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.

Ghosts and Ghoulies and Trunks, Oh My!

Hey.

Gonna wheel out an old classic blog for one more Halloween haunt.

I wrote this horror book a couple of years before A Graveyard Visible, see. It's called Macadamian Pliers. Haunted house, a man of strange angles, trouble in a new town.  It's got everything you need for Halloween. (Hint, hint. So does 'A Graveyard Visible'. Graveyards, revenants, abandoned mansions, what more do you want?) And one of the kids in it, Jack, he's crazy-mad about ghosts and ghoulies and stuff. He's got a mondo-huge collection of mad spooky stories, new stuff and his own takes on the classics, and he sticks them all up on this website he shares with Cherry and Frank Raine - ihatemacadamianpliers.weebly.com So, to get into the mood for that most creepy time of the year, I'm going to let him take over my blog.

Okay, I'm handing over to Jack now. The kid tells a mean story. Strap in, and good luck.

The Trunk

I'll start with this bad ass story that messed my skull up for days. I got a trunk full of comics and couldn't go near them, which was a real pain.

'There was this old house that was abandoned and up for sale and these college kids were always messing around in there, having parties and stuff. There was usually about seven or eight of them, and they decided to play hide and seek. The game went on for a total age, and the college kids got bored before they finished they game, and did off. It wasn't until the next day that they realised one of them, a girl, was missing. They phoned her and called round her house and she never turned up. She was totally gone.
So it's five months after all this happened, and this family bought the house and moved in. They had a ton of stuff so it took an age, and there was a bunch of old furniture and stuff there already, but the mom wanted to keep it because she thought it was cool, the weird way oldies do. In the kid's bedroom was this properly old trunk, and that was where he wanted to stick his toys, but the lock on it was stuck. The dad sorted that out with a hammer, and they opened the trunk, and in there was the rotted body of the missing girl, all stinking and putrid, and her mouth was open in a big wide O, and her nails were all broken where she'd tried to get out.
Sick!
That ain't all of it.
The police took the body, and the family threw the trunk out. The kid was a total sycolo.. psykol... mental mess, but eventually he had to sleep in his room on his own. He was there in the dark, on his own, and BOOM! There was a loud thud, like something real heavy landing on the floor. He was so scared he couldn't shout for his mom. He could hardly bring himself to turn on the light... but when he did, it was there! The trunk had come back. He was actually kinda glad to see it coz he could stick all his toys and junk in there, so he got out of bed and went to the trunk and opened it up, and a rotting corpse leapt out and dragged him in!
When the trunk was eventually searched it was completely empty. Years later another family moved in and got rid of the trunk, but the next night when their little girl went to bed it reappeared, and do you know why? Because the thing in the trunk was hungry again, and it was time for another meal...'

Bloody Mary

I'm gonna tell this one the way my sister tells it, because her version kicks ass.

'It was, like, a century ago, before most of these houses were here. There was a woman who lived by the lake, the one past where the school is, and she lived there alone with her little daughter. The kid ended up drowning in the lake and this woman, Mary, she couldn’t cope with the grief. Eventually it drove her nuts, properly insane. People stopped going anywhere near the place. She could be heard screaming and wailing at all hours of the day, and would be seen beating herself with stones. The madness made Mary blame herself for her daughter’s death. Then the townsfolk’s children started going missing, but only the girls. It didn’t take long for the blame to land on Mary. The mob went out to her home, not to challenge her with their accusations, but to exact their revenge. They had already decided she was guilty.
Another girl disappeared after Mary was dead. She was spotted being carried away in the arms of a man headed for the lake. He was a labourer who’d moved into the area a few months earlier, and he admitted responsibility for all the disappearances. Mary’s daughter was his first victim.
And that’s what makes for a restless spirit. She waits for any opportunity to take her revenge on this town for what they did to her. It’s said that she can be summoned by chanting in the mirror…
You have to say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, who killed your daughter Bloody Mary? They say she doesn’t just appear, though. They say she tries to smash her way through.'

Skinned Tom

This one is awesome.

'Every town has a lover's lane, one of those places where guys and chicks drive to and then sit there with soppy-ass music playing while they get it on, wasting their time. There's one town, though, where you should totally avoid the lover's lane, and I'll tell you why. Tom took this married chick there every friday night, been doing it for months. This one night they were there, kissing and whatever, when the car door was pulled open, and the chick's husband was right there and he had a knife and he was properly angry! He stabbed his wife, then dragged Tom out of the car, and said to Tom 'I told you before, didn't I? I told you if I caught you again I'd skin you alive!'
The married chick didn't die, and while she was in hospital she told the police what had gone down. As it turns out, the husband handed himself over to the police, owning up to his crimes. But Tom wasn't found. They searched and searched, but the only thing they found was a few splashes of blood near the car.
People started going missing after that. Couples would go up to lover's lane and never return. Their car would be found abandoned, and covered in bloody hand-prints. There's only ever been one survivor of these attacks, and she wound up in the loony bin, but before she got locked up she told a doctor what she saw. It was a bloody skeleton, and it was holding a knife, and it told her it needed her skin because it didn't have any of it's own.
Nobody goes up there anymore.'

Massive thanks to my man Jack for all the entertainment. We might have to invite him back again before the big night itself, Halloween...
If you liked Jack's tall tales, you might just get a kick out of the horror story he finds himself a part of. Macadamian Pliers

myBook.to/AGraveyardVisible

Laters.

Bad review, what do I do?

I got a couple of bad reviews, and now I'm in freefall and I don't know what to do.

This is a particularly painful post, and I've thought long and hard whether to publish it. I promised myself, however, that if I wrote a blog then I would be honest about the writing journey. With that in mind, this is going to be a very honest post, possibly to the detriment of my unreleased book. But what can you do? The bloody reviews are out there now. No hiding those.

Way back when I started this bloody thing,

I never thought it would be so much trouble.

It all seemed like a pretty good idea. New book A Graveyard Visible is due for release at the end of April, and I was feeling confident about it, thought it was about as good a piece of work as I could put together (after all, I sent it to a publisher, and they accepted it, so, you know...) Why not drum up a bit of interest for my YA horror nice and early? I stumbled upon a scheme to garner a bunch of reviews. So I went for it.

Yeah. Pretty good idea.

First review came in. I checked it out nervously. It was great:

'This book goes from “good” to “great” to “I can’t put this book down until I have finished it”. If you want creepy, edge-of-your-seat page turner, this is for you!'

In the spirit of honesty, then, here are some direct quotes from the negative reviews, and this is the stuff that broke my heart:

'Ok, I did not get this book at all. I love suspense and horror, but this was a mangled mess of confusion. The alternating third person perspective and stream of consciousness just left me confused. This would have been a DNF for me except I felt guilty...'

And even worse:

'The story started off strong and I was captivated by the idea of what could be happening within the graveyard. The narrative soon became really difficult to follow. Each chapter switched between many characters’ perspectives and it often took me reading a paragraph or two to understand which character I was reading about.
This was a difficult book for me to get through. I ended up quitting with only 70 pages left because I was just uninterested and not invested in the story. '

Never in my life thought I'd write a novel people didn't want to finish! I can't imagine a review being any worse.

This is what my cat thinks of the whole situation.

Again, being honest, I got defensive when I read these. When you've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours creating something you believe in, anyone would get a tad bristly, I suppose. So let's get the stroppy author bit out of the way. The main beef here seemed to be the multiple perspectives. But what's wrong with that? I whined. It's hardly the first novel to have multiple bloody viewpoints. It's standard stuff for telling big tales! It's meant to give proceedings a touch of the ole epic scope. It keeps the story fresh, lends a bit of unpredictability to how it all unfolds.

Look, there's not that many viewpoints! There's our two leads Caleb and Misha, some flashback stuff (which is all in italics, by the way), some very brief stuff with the grandparents, and some short sequences with the villain of the piece, and he's really obvious because he has all these dark thoughts 'n that. That's it. Caleb is a very normal boy, Misha is a bit odd, it's all signposted quite clearly.

I've read a ton of books that switch viewpoints. Grab one of Stephen King's bigger epics - The Stand, Under The Dome - and you'll be switching all over the place. I don't think it's that hard to keep up in my novel. Really I don't. Maybe I'm too close to the story though. After all, it did take longer than usual and more effort to get it done. Maybe I've buggered it up far more than I think.

Anyhoo, my defense is all well and good... but so far two readers don't buy it. That there is bad news, bro.
It could be that multiple viewpoints just wasn't to these readers' tastes. Having two of them say the same thing though? Oh man...

Like I said at the beginning, I don't know what to do. It feels like the damn book's been murdered before it's anywhere near release. Is it fixable? Do I dare get more reviews? I have to, in the hope I can get some balance, get a few good ones in, so that at least it looks like a divisive novel. That would be a good sell, the book that you either love or hate. But... what if more reviewers hate it? What if that's all AGV gets? I don't know what to do....

Oh yeah, I'm comfort eating these days. You wanna see how big I can get? Keep posting them bad reviews, guys. Reckon I could end up a whopper.

Laters.

Love it or hate it, They'll come after you anyway.

Pre-order here. Release date 27th April 2018

My problem with promotion... is me

So.
Nobody bothered to read my last post about It, the deep, insightful and topical piece that I thought was totally relevant right about now.
Get bent, all of you.

Anyway, on with today.
My problem (apart from a slight attitude issue) at the moment is promoting my own fine novels. I'm not good at it. It's a complete bogglement to me.
I tend to think about promotion, shrug, then hide myself in the writing of the next novel. Very unprofessional.

I've said this before, but that doesn't make it any less true. I allowed work to get in the way of my writing and I let that happen for way too long. It got out of control. 60 hours a week has become the norm. Not good and not right. It was hard to write, let alone think about promoting my work or putting fresh stuff out there. It's been frustrating to release Mac Pliers then realise that I haven't really done anywhere near enough to support it. I can't let that happen again.

I did try, though.

The thing with Twitter is, it looked to me like Mac Pliers was getting completely lost in a vast sea of other books. A lot of people know how to get the best out of a tweet - make it visual with a cover image, use the right hashtags, get those key words in. When everyone knows how to do it right, it's hard to stand out. Unless you bombard Twitter with adverts every ten minutes, that is, and then people just get sick of seeing your book. I'm trying to use Twitter again, sparingly, but... I still get the feeling that the only people retweeting books are those who are only after a retweet themselves.
But you've gotta try, right? Something's better than nothing.

The thing with Facebook is, it's just my family, mates and people I knew in places I worked once. These people would either buy a copy anyway, expect a new one, or don't like me but can't be arsed to have me 'removed' (ominous). One can always try Facebook advertising, one supposes, but one was broke, so one didn't, did one?
But you've gotta try, right? Something's better than nothing.

The thing with getting reviews is, well, you've got to get people to write them and post them. I tried so many book bloggers, read their sites to get an idea of what they were like, personalised each and every contact, and I think I ended up with one review out of it, and I didn't realise that review had gone live until months later.
Something's... better than nothing?

And there's a load of sites that promise you a promotion package, for a price. Eye-watering prices, some of them (although, to be fair, anything beyond stumping up a tenner makes me weep (ask my girls, I've got a chain wrapped around my wallet)). I couldn't really see much benefit to anyone who took on these book blitzes or bashes or bonanzas or bombing raids or whatever they're called.

It was all a bit discouraging.

But.

This time I'm not a new writer with just one book to his name. I'm a seasoned veteran, with his second (fantastically well-produced) novel on the way, both in the same genre. I've got an actual body of work to peddle here. And I think I need to work to one other strength - I'm not self-published. This isn't vanity, and I'm not expected to 'donate' towards the publishing company's marketing costs. I am true legit. For real.

Things seem to be going a little better this time. I'm about to send off A Graveyard Visible to be part of a fantastic new review scheme, Kid Lit Exchange. Find them here: https://theloudlibrarylady.com/kidlitexchange/   These guys ask only for one copy of your book, then, when one of their reviewers wants to read it, the Kid Lit Exchange sends it out, and it's that one copy which does the rounds. Fingers crossed for a few rounds, then.
I've decided not to give up on book bloggers either, and I'm going through a ton of blogs to find out who might be a good fit for good old AGV (plus my publisher is proving to be very helpful so far, offering to send out copies on my behalf. Sweet!)

Also, to my absolute horror, I have landed an interview on a podcast. Yeah. One of them things where people can hear you. And see you, I think, because I've got to do it over Skype. My God. I'll have to brush my bloody hair.
It took me about a week to pluck up the courage to choose a time slot for the interview (early October, broadcast date as yet unknown). I had to pretend to myself that it wouldn't be awful and my voice wouldn't sound terrible and I'd sound very charming and witty and that it's all for the good of the book. Got - to - try.

I shall also be throwing myself into everything else, yes even the stuff that I'm not sure worked the first time - Twitter, Facebook and it's forums. I think blogs and review and book news sites are the way to go, though. Author spotlights, reveals, that sort of thing. You've gotta try, right?

What you have to be, then, is brave. You must be determined. You must be bloody-minded in the face of ignorance. You must be a pain in the arse - but a nice one. Annoying is off the table. And whatever happens, you must be prepared to carry on. And on. And on.

I will post some (fairly) regular updates here, with what I've been doing, what's worked, what I'm trying next. See how we go, eh?

Come back soon for a freebie. Next post will be a short story, I reckon. Bit of fun.

Available for pre-order at Amazon.

Release date April 2018

Laters.