All about horror, and horror's what it's all about.

Or, what works in horror and what doesn't. Because a lot of horror really doesn't work. We should all know this now that Halloween is done and we've gorged on scary movies and spooky books. Who am I, then, to talk about this?

I write horror novels, mostly. The primary target audience is not adult. I'm aiming for the 12-15 year olds (although if the rest of the world wants to hop on board I'm convinced they'll enjoy the ride). This has thrown up a key question: How much horror is the right amount of horror? This is followed by a further question: Am I getting it right? One final question: How much of my writing time can I waste by writing a blog about these pertinent questions?

All my keys say this.

My first go at YA horror was called Macadamian Pliers and it's about a particularly sinister man with an unpleasant plan. We've got haunted houses, growlings in attics, vigorous ghosts, draggings into dark wardrobes, a mausoleum, and a fairly hectic final sequence. I tipped a couple of bags of horror in and gave it all a good stir. I told myself while writing it not to hold back, not to self-censor, just get the story done. I didn't want to dilute the inherent badness of a man like Pliers. As it turns out, Mac was the first of my stories I actually enjoyed upon reading it back (after letting it settle for a couple of months - it's vital to step away and leave the first draft alone when finished). There's a sense of foreboding to the piece, and Mac himself is creepy as hell. It's about the scares, not the grue.

And it's not exactly the stuff I thought I'd write.

When I was younger (late teens - like I was ever there) I envisioned myself as becoming a writer with Stephen King's enviable ability to spin a tale and James Herbert's ability to shock (all those chewing rats - yuk), but my heart wasn't quite in it. There was little joy in blood and guts for the sake of it. All the gruesome stuff... it's horrible, yes, but is it really horror? As a fan who's seen far too many films and read plenty of books, I'll tell you here and now that the answer is very, very close to no. Your Saws and Final Destinations and Shaun Hutson books and all the rest can be found at the lowest level, where the horror genre is at its least effective. No point in arguing with me, because it's true. Ring and Spiral (both in book and film form) are exponentially more effective at scaring, at horrifying, at lingering long after they are over. There's a couple of bits in Mama (which I watched recently - decent film, terrible ending as usual) which actually caused my toes to curl. Scares driven by suggestion. The Conjuring films and the second Annabelle are equally effective. The first Annabelle movie is not (and do not ever speak to me of the abysmal The Nun).
The blood is the after-effect of the event. It is the result. It should not be the whole story.

That cover still gives me the heeby-jeebies.

So I'm not that into blood and grue. My writing should be alright for younger readers, then? Nothing wrong with a few scares.
But there's those who will automatically shake their head and demand such books be burned. Ghosts and ghouls and bad men at the bottom of the garden? Horror is for grown-up sickos, not kids. No spooky stuff, no ghosts, no wizards even. Look at all the hullabaloo about Harry Potter in the US of A (funny bunch, you Americans). Maybe there's a good point to be made - a young person's imagination is electric and lively, and is arguably far better than an adult's at making these spooks and demons real.
Yes, I don't bother with the extremely icky stuff. It's all about the power of suggestion people! And that power can be strong. The threat is all you need. Any idiot can write in detail about cuts and splashes and gouts and sprays and loppings and choppings. Can you make the reader fear those horrors without ever painting them clearly? If so, the reader is yours to manipulate - and therein lies my concern.

Conscience, then, can be the writer's only guide. Conscience and confidence, the assurance that you know how far is far enough.

I've said before that horror is a constant let-down. And it's running out of ideas, right? So why am I bothering? Well, for the reasons I've discussed. There are other ways to go with horror, other stories to tell. There are plenty of characters waiting for someone to forget all the old cliches and to concentrate on story instead.

But I've got a cheek. Even I, who dares to spout off like he knows anything, am guilty of stealing well-worn tropes and settings.
The graveyard is one such classic setting. It comes with spookiness built-in. The second novel was called A Graveyard Visible. And yes, I am aware that I'm wide open to accusations of laziness. Ooo. A graveyard. And spookiness. Well done, Steve. However did you come up with that? Do something new, you might yell in my general direction. You think you're so clever? Try doing horror somewhere totally new, like a haunted microwave, make that scary! Well, shut your face. I've given the haunted house a twist, (a twist in the grim shape of a man called Macadamian) and I did something new down at the graveyard as well.
(God, I get so defensive when I make up arguments in my head.)

Anyway, I'm done for now. I'll probably have more to say about this...

Laters.

The Haunting of Hill House - Opinion: The Only Good TV Horror Show Ever?

Yeah, I said it.

So, it's Halloween, and there's this series that's been released on Netflix (handily in time for the season), and everyone's talking about it, and I want to chip in.

When I was young, and pretty much all through my life really, I would get pretty excited about the announcement of a new horror series, thinking that this would be the one to meet my expectations. It would be exciting, it would be intriguing, and most importantly, it would consistently scare the life out of me. It never ever happened. All horror tv has, to some extent, been a let-down. Let's make our way to Hill House, then, see what it has in store for us.

Ultra quick recap: Shirley Jackson's original novel is a masterpiece (if you write horror, then you better read it if you haven't already - it's an excellent lesson in how to create creeping dread). The 1963 film version freaked me out when I was 11, and all because of great acting, excellent camerawork, and knock-out sound design. The 1999 version was a disgrace.

Now we've got Mike Flanagan bringing us a ten episode limited series. The feller's got good form. 'Absentia' was the first of his films I saw, and while the pace was a bit too slow for me, some parts were genuinely creepy, and showed him to be a writer/director to watch. 'Oculus' was great, and then he pulled a real surprise out of the bag: he directed the sequel to 'Ouija' which was a terrible movie. His sequel was great. No kidding. Towards the end it really ramps up the crazy. 2017 saw him film the unfilmable 'Gerald's Game' and somehow made it great (and with a gruesome scene that even I found hard to watch). So, hopes were high.

I won't say a lot about the storyline. You should discover it for yourself. If you've read the original novel, expect large amounts of significant changes. This is a remix on a grand scale. You will recognise many of the elements, but there's been a lot of expansion. You get to know every member of the family. The story spans twenty years or so, we move around a lot on the timeline, and you will eventually get all the pieces of the puzzle, just not necessarily in the right order. It's great fun tracking the timelines.

The acting almost across the board is excellent - didn't really dig the guy playing Steve (a shame as it's a smashing name) as he seemed to be trying too hard and couldn't keep up with the rest. Luke and Theodora are stand-outs. This is due in large part to the writing. It really is a cut above pretty much anything else out there, whatever the genre.

There's a particularly stunning episode halfway through which is basically made up of about three or four long-running shots. It's so well-done, I really don't think I'll forget it for quite some time. So much happens in the background as the camera roams around a funeral parlour and then in the house itself. It really adds to the variety displayed across all ten episodes, where you never quite know where the story will go next or how it will be presented.

Unfortunately, the final extended episode was a scare-free zone for me, which was a disappointment. It's still a good ending, however - the story is wrapped up effectively, the characters reach the ends of their arcs as they should, I can't fault the writing there. There was simply a lack of frightening elements, a let-down given how much had come before it.

Look at this place. I mean, would you ever

go in there? Ever?

Here it is, then: Hill House works. I never would have believed that a near-ten hour haunted house movie (which is what this basically is) could work, but it does. And there are a LOT of spooks to mess with your head. (At the time of writing, I heard that there are even two dozen ghosts hidden in the background of the episodes, so there's plenty here for easter egg hunters to enjoy.)

The Haunting of Hill House is the only REAL horror series out there.

To back up my claim (which is only an opinion (but it's the right one)), let me restate my key point: a horror show, a really good horror show, should be scary. It should be frightening. It should instill a sensation of dread. I mean that at some point (and fairly regularly) I should feel fear. I went through a few lists of 'best horror tv series ever', so let's take a few of these examples and rip them to bits (kidding, most of these shows are good, but not good at what I'm looking for in this blog).

The Walking Dead. Many would claim this to be the biggest and best horror series ever made. I would not. It's a gory drama show. Also, a lot of time (far, far too much of the time) it's a boring gory drama show. And I mean dull. The first season, the short one, was great. Enjoyed it. However, it got dull real quick. Season 4 (or 5, can't remember), the one after they leave the prison behind (that was dull as well), is possibly the worst of all. Episode after episode, the characters found a safe place, then the place wasn't safe, then they ran away. It happened again and again. There's just not enough in the world they've created for the writers to explore.
Thing is, and this is the main issue here, zombies aren't scary. I have yet to see a scary zombie movie. They're gross and horrible, but it's really only a case of waiting for the next gore scene. How many ways can we tear someone apart and gobble them up? This is coming from someone who was a real champion of gruesome special effects, by the way.

American Horror Story. Not scary at all. Ever. It's a freakshow. It's only interested in trying to be shocking. Sorry, but I really can't stand this series. It always strikes me as being written by a bunch of teenagers too busy dreaming up rude and disgusting things to put on camera without actually considering the important things like story and character. I've made it through two seasons - Coven, and... actually, no, that's the only one I got to the end of. I always have to give up after a few episodes. The latest season, got to halfway through episode two. Can't be bothered to waste my life on crap.

Stranger Things. Not horror, no scares. Move along.

Tales From the Crypt. Too tame to be remotely scary. And in all honesty, a lot of the episodes now are barely watchable. Even at the time the production value on this series was pretty low. Age has given this a battering.

The Terror. An okay series with great production values, but the scares just don't work for me. It's another one that relies on a bit of gore to get a reaction. The book is better, but not particularly scary. It's depressing, and involving, and atmospheric, and you feel bad for the characters, but that's not the same thing as frightening.

Castle Rock. Now, I've only watched four episodes of this, and I'm curious to see how it turns out, so I don't want to be overly judgemental yet. However, again there's no scares. It's just odd. It seems to be going for a Twin Peaks vibe which doesn't really gel with the notion that this is meant to be a series encompassing all things Stephen King. King does not write in a Twin Peaks style. And it might just be me, but I find the characters hard to connect with. I'm simply not that bothered about what happens to any of them.

To clarify, I'm not saying all of the series above are bad. Not at all. Apart from American Horror Story. I'd rather bash nails into my elbows than watch that again. But none of them are the horror series I was hoping for when young. I wanted something to scare me, to rattle my bones, to quake my boots. Gore is not horror. It's just gross. The writer, the director, they need to do real work in order to make the horror effective. We have to care about the characters, and we have to believe they are in genuine danger, because if we believe in the characters we will feel the danger as our own. The Haunting of Hill House nails it.

Laters.

The Definitive It.

Let's jump right on that bandwagon!

I feel justified too. Stephen King's been a huge influence on my burgeoning career as a writer, and It had a major effect on me. So damn right I'm going to wade in on this.

Now, it's been a while (yet again) since I've posted. I was just getting some momentum going, then... you know, events happened. I'll talk about some of it in a future post, not quite ready yet.

But there's no better time than now to discuss It.

I'm going to state my conclusion up front: I believe the upcoming movie adaptation will be the definitive version of the story. Novel included. There. I said it. And you know what? I mean it.
There's going to be a lot of 'It's and 'it's going on here. Should be fun to keep up with.

Here's my raggled copy. Probably worth about 20p.

Which is less than a Freddo. Seriously, how do they cost so much?

Before I go any further, and hopefully before the hatchets come out, let me jot down a couple of provisos. I love Stephen King, right? I've gobbled up his books since I was just starting my teens, and there's no doubt that he's a big influence on me becoming a writer. Also, most (note that word most) of the novel It is great - just be aware that I'm going to argue how King started out very, very good, and got a hell of a lot better as his career went on.

Also, I don't have a lot of room to judge, really. My first novel probably sold 6 copies (3 to me), and my second isn't due out until April 2018 (subtle plug for A Graveyard Visible there), so I'm not exactly at the top of my game yet. Still, I retain the right to be as critical as everyone believes they have the God-given right to be on the internet - and I shall do so constructively.

The main thing, and let's get this out of the way now, is the ending. We can all agree that the ending of the original 1990 mini-series didn't work. It's not just the special effects either (can't expect much; It was made for 90's American tv, and there was no budget for effects, and no room at all for any of the gore in the book). Dramatically, it's flat.

The novel has the same problem. The climactic confrontation doesn't work, not when the characters are kids, and certainly not when they're adults (both battles run in parallel, switching from one to another in an attempt to give a double-rush of excitement). You see, we've spent near enough a thousand pages following their various clashes with It in it's multiple unpleasant forms... and then at the end, apparently the best our human minds can do with It's 'true' form is to conjure it as a big spider. Oh well. This form simply doesn't compete, terror-wise, with a psychotic clown called Pennywise. Nor is it as scary as the leper, or the werewolf, or any other of It's visceral, beastly, life-threatening variants. In truth, this last form is a real disappointment, and we would have been better off with the clown. There are other issues, such as the Turtle, which is about as 'out there' (readers of the novel might get that one) as King has managed to go, and I suspect that his editor let him get away with a little bit too much.

I mean, really. Even back at the time I thought we 

would have been better off with no ending than this.

The point of all this? From what I've read, the makers of the new It 2 part movie are dropping the ending entirely. No spider. Hooray! Common sense prevails! The weakest part of the novel is being removed. What are they replacing it with? Who knows, but I'm actually looking forward to finding out. At least now there's a chance that, come the final reel of film two, I might not be disappointed this time.
The only part of the prolonged end sequence that works is the devastation that descends upon the town of Derry, and how the place falls apart. I do hope that some element of this is retained somewhere along the line.

Is that all I've got? Nope. There are other issues, things that absolutely would not translate to screen, some for legal reasons I suspect. The whole 'Beverly' scene towards the end (if you've read It, you know the one, if you haven't, then you really need to be prepared for a no-holds-barred experience) has also been left out, which is only right, really. In fact, something I'm hoping has changed significantly is the portrayal of Beverly throughout the story, particularly as an adult. She's pretty much a vessel for men to do what they want. You can argue that's caused by the treatment she receives from her father, but it's all a bit flat and one-dimensional. And don't get me started on the sappy performance of her in the 1990 mini-series. Let's leave that in the past where it belongs.
From the sounds of things, the amount of (mostly) verbal abuse that the Losers Club receive is going to be toned down, and I think that's a shame. We have to be honest about bullying. Kids can be really unpleasant shitheads. There's no point kidding ourselves; if you can think a vile thought, then you can bet that some kid somewhere on this planet is gleefully shouting it at someone at the top of her/his lungs.

Cannot wait. Absolutely cannot wait.

They're making other changes too - the forms It takes throughout the novel are being altered for the screen. We're going to get the Leper and the dead kids, and that might be all from the original. I'm all for seeing something new. Plus it will be good to get the Leper this time - that part of the novel is freaky. And the Leper isn't going to be CGI. Look it up if you don't believe me...

Does it sound like I'm not a fan of the novel? Because that's not strictly true. It is the best two thirds of any horror novel I've ever read. The sense of place and time it conveys is phenomenal. So rich. You can almost smell the heat of the Barrens, and hear the running of the water (in both canals and sewers). I just think there's always a problem with having a main baddie/creature who's true form we cannot comprehend. If our mind can't see it, then how's something supposed to write it (it? It? it It? Aaaaargh)? Anyway, I'd place good money on this being the best horror film of the year, and if it's not... well, I'll eat my hat. Or your hat. Or your dinner. Whatever looks better.

Let's all report back after the movie's come out, what do you say?

Laters.

(Click here to see if I can write any better.)

A Book Left Behind

I have abandoned writing 'A Graveyard Visible'. It's the first time I've turned away from a novel in about ten years.

And I'm okay with it.

In January I started writing a sequel to a comedy about a young mad scientist (a book only our Erin has read so far, but by jingo did it make her laugh), and it's flying along, over a third done already. A Graveyard Visible might come back to life (ha ha) after this, it might not.

I'm okay with that too.

Now bear with me for a moment here: this will all come together very soon. Our Lucy came up with an answer to the question of how she always had room for ice cream. Her food goes into separate compartments, so when she says she's full at dinner time, what she means is that the 'main' compartment is full, and it's time to move on to the dessert compartment. (It gets weirder - each compartment is manned by a full staff of little people who make sure each food is delivered to the correct section - by the way, you never want to be demoted to the bowels.)

Let's replace the stomach with my imagination. It used to have lots of compartments, lots of rooms with different stories and ideas in each. A Graveyard Visible had overflowed. It had blocked up all my compartments. At the start of writing (and this is usual for me) I had a big room set aside for AGV, some space for knocking around new ideas, a sunny area where I could forget about writing new material and do some promo work for Macadamian Pliers (just published with Black Rose Writing). Imagination was a lively factory with plenty of inhabitants. But as the Graveyard grew in the book and the intensity of its issues increased, so it spilled out of its holding pen, and eventually everything else moved out. And AGV kept on pushing at the walls.

It was making me unhappy. So I flushed it out. (I hesitate to use the phrase 'novel enema' because that sounds a tad unpleasant - so I won't even mention it.) And I had all these rooms, all these compartments standing empty, with workers in desperate for something to do. The ideas flooded in. I was writing again. And I was happy about it again.

But this all got me thinking about abandoned novels.

I've been reading Stephen King's The Plant. Not sure if it counts as an abandoned novel or not, but it's certainly an unfinished story, and might never be finished. It's great fun, and I got to wondering about what else might be out there.

I came across this fascinating article from The New York Times a few years ago. It's fascinating to read about Michael Chabon's difficulties writing 'Fortune City' - and makes me feel a hell of a lot better that five and a half years went into this novel before he turned his back on it. AGV took up six months. I'm certainly not comparing the quality of my work to his - but I think another five years (even off and on) with AGV would be the end of the writer in me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Kois-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Look here as well to read about today's superstar writer John Green and the troubles he's had with abandoned novels : http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/7193828359/abandoned-books-2-the-desert-island-one

One more link to keep you busy: https://litreactor.com/columns/12-unpublished-novels-we-wish-we-could-read A never-to-be-seen book from Philip K Dick? Painful. But that one's because he died before finishing. So I guess he can be forgiven.

All of this has been fascinating to read, but what have I got from it all? This: sometimes we can put too much into something and forget why we were doing it in the first place. It should be done for the love of it, because from love we get joy, fun, security, happiness, and all that the soul needs. I'm now writing what I want to, and planning what I want next, and I've been able to enjoy a week's holiday with my beautiful family because I have all that's important, and I can see that I have it: joy, fun, security, happiness, love.

That might be a grand ending to this piece, but hey, I'm okay with that.

The gates have closed on the Graveyard. I think I've still got the keys. Somewhere...

Laters