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Guest post: Kate Messner on the Research Process

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We are thrilled to be a stop on author Kate Messner’s Sugar and Ice blog tour! Sugar and Ice will be released on December 7, 2010 and you can find more information about Kate and her books at KateMessner.com or at her LiveJournal blog.

For Claire Boucher, life is all about skating on the frozen cow pond and in the annual Maple Show right before the big pancake breakfast on her family’s maple farm. But all that changes when Claire is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity-a scholarship to train with the elite skaters in Lake Placid. Tossed into a world of mean girls on ice, where competition is everything, Claire soon realizes that her sweet dream-come-true has sharper edges than she could have imagined. Can she find the strength to stand up to the people who want her to fail and the courage to decide which dream she wants to follow?

Sugar and Ice was a book that happened by accident.
In the summer of 2008, my daughter heard about a basic skills figure skating day camp at the Olympic Center in Lake Placid. She’s not a competitive skater, but it sounded like fun and wasn’t too far a drive, so we signed her up. I had big plans to drop her off for the day and head for the coffee shop across the street to finish revising The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z., which was due to my editor in a couple weeks.
But I missed the fine print…the part that said when I signed the girl up for skating camp, I was also signing myself up for a parent education program. I tied her skates on the first day and picked up my backpack to head for the coffee shop, only to be handed a thick “skater-mom” folder and directed back to my seat. What followed was a parade of experts, talking about everything from thousand dollar blades to sewing sequins more effectively.
“Wait!” I thought. “There’s been a mistake! My daughter doesn’t even skate in competitions…”
But when the next speaker was a sports psychologist who specializes in working with skaters and their families, I stopped wishing for my latte and took out my notebook. Her insights and stories were fascinating, and I couldn’t help thinking that a story was falling into my lap.
What if a girl with no interest in competition were suddenly plunked into the middle of this uber-competitive world? I paged through my notebook, the part where I keep a list of places I love and might want to use as a setting some day, and that’s where I discovered Claire, the main character of Sugar and Ice, a small town girl whose family runs a maple farm near the Canadian border.
I scribbled notes all through that weekend and would return to the Olympic Center numerous times for research while I was writing. I sat at the Empire State Games and Junior Nationals competitions and collected skating details in my notebook, jotting down details about the girls’ outfits, making notes on their music. I asked questions about the moves, and inter
viewed skaters. I spent several afternoons listening in as a high-level coach wor
ked with his skaters on the ice; I wrote down the kinds of things he told them
about how to hold their shoulders, the words he used to encourage them and to push them harder.
More than two years after that door closed at the Olympic Center, trapping me in the parent education session, Sugar and Ice is being released from Bloombury/Walker, and I couldn’t be more thankful.

Guest Post: Horror Lit 101, Part the Fourth

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Guest blogger Matthew Jackson continues his series of posts for the month of October on horror literature. Today’s post is part four of four. Make sure you’ve read up on the entire series by reading the first installment here, the second installment here, and the third installment here.
Horror Lit 101, Part the Fourth: In which we attempt to crystal gaze.
Some say horror fiction is dead. It’s bleedin’ demised. It’s passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its Maker. It is a late genre. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-genre.
These people are cynics, but I won’t hold that against them. If you read as much grim fiction as people like me have, you tend to lean toward grim opinions. But I’m not among this crowd. I don’t believe the genre is dead. It’s evolving, just like it always has.
It’s not what it used to be, of course. It would be easy to argue that horror is alive because vampires and werewolves and the like are alive. A quick browse of any bookstore will tell you that. But they don’t exist solely in horror anymore. They’re busy with other things. Seducing teenage girls (But not going all the way. That’s important.), seducing women, brooding, seducing more women, brooding some more, getting thrown into scenes of Victorian courtship and, most importantly, sparkling. 
I’m not judging, by the way. If paranormal romance is your bag, read your heart out, but don’t mistake it for horror. Horror can titillate and romance and erotica can horrify, but we’re talking about different things here. It would also be easy to argue that horror doesn’t exist on its own anymore. Sci-fi horror exists, and fantasy horror, and modern horror and mystery horror and so on and so on. But this to me is a misstatement as well, because these genres don’t encapsulate horror. The fact that horror is the only unifying part of these terms means that horror is the broader encapsulating genre, not the other way around.
So where is all of it going? Do we need to fear the loss of our beloved ghouls and ghosts? What is the future of horror? If we attempt to gaze into that psychic voice of trembling future visions, what will we see?
In attempt to answer these questions, we will have to comb the details. Rather than look at bodies of work, we must look at individual works by authors currently working in horror. To keep things brief and tidy, I’ll focus on five works (long and short) by five different writers working to some degree or other within the genre. I do not claim to be a soothsayer by any means, just someone who cares a great deal about these kinds of stories. Still, I shall attempt to delight you with feats of psychic talent. Dim the lights, please.
From Hell by Alan Moore
This is the oldest of the works on my list, published in volumes from 1991-1996, but it’s worth talking, not only because it represents a return to horror in the graphic novel form (Horror comics were big in the early part of the 20th century, but died off when the Comics Code Authority came to prominence.), but because it was written by one of the great writers of our time, Mr. Alan Moore (The Great Bearded Wizard of Comics). 
From Hell is a massive (more than 500 page) re-interpretation of the Jack the Ripper tale that employs holistic crime solving theories (To solve a crime you must solve the society in which it takes place. See Douglas Adams for more information.), psychogeography and other realms of the bizarre where Moore is king. In addition to all this complexity, it’s simply a terrifying portrait of a murderer. Never once are we in doubt of who the Ripper is, but the fact that we get to follow him around just makes it scarier. Moore’s story, like most of his other genre-bending masterpieces, raised the bar for both comics writers and horror writers. The new face of horror was going to be a more complex one, and Moore, along with Clive Barker, whom we discussed last week, was among the first writers to declare it so.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Scary stories are becoming more of an all-ages phenomenon than ever before, stretching even beyond that cutesy Roald Dahl kind of scary stuff. Apart from having a wonderful fairy tale feel, Coraline is just damn scary, from its atmospheric treatment of things going bump in the night, to its creation of an all too familiar monster in The Other Mother, the title character’s Mom in a parallel universe. Buttons for eyes, long, clawing fingers and a tendency to devour beetles are just a few of the more terrifying traits of this witchy creation, and the fact that the whole tale is grounded in the perspective of a young girl who’s just bored and tired of her own parents makes it all the more real. 
Gaiman himself has been pushing a “new tradition” in which we give each other scary books for Hallowe’en, something the blogosphere has dubbed “All Hallows Read.” This is the book I would recommend for anyone in your life, young or old, who could use a good fright.
“Abraham’s Boys” by Joe Hill
The son of Stephen King has proven himself quite the scary scribe in his own right, producing two acclaimed novels (Heart Shaped Box and Horns) and a collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, which includes “Abraham’s Boys,” a tale of the sons of Abraham Van Helsing and their education in the art of executing vampires. 
All of Hill’s work is wonderful, but “Abraham’s Boys” is my favorite, because it seems to be the best indicator of the kind of badass horror story to end all horror stories he sets out to write. It ties in a legendary character from what some would call the greatest horror novel ever written, gives it a slightly more modern twist, and gives a fresh perspective to the vampire phenomenon by setting his story in the hearts and minds of children just learning about such terrors, even as their father is the world’s foremost expert. It’s an example of the ambition of modern horror. There are fewer writers attempting to pursue the genre in the classic sense, but the ones that are give it everything they’ve got.
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Like Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, The Passage is a book about the end of the world and how the remnants of humanity cope with what’s happened. While both King’s and McCammon’s stories use somewhat supernatural elements pitting man against man, Cronin’s pits humanity against a super and/or subhuman element, a horde of vampiric creatures known as “virals.” They were humans once, beginning as a few laboratory test subjects given injections of a virus that might have given them powerful healing ability. Instead they turned into monsters and took over the world, and now what’s left of the uninfected are just fighting to survive. 
This is the first book in a proposed trilogy on the battle to overcome the virals, so it’s not clear yet exactly where Cronin will wrap all of this up, but The Passage itself is certainly a novel of very modern fears. We’ve always worried that technology would be the death of us, and Cronin takes that one step further, creating a very literal metaphor for how man makes its own monsters. Horror of this kind is no longer about a foreign beast come to conquer us. It’s about how we devour ourselves.
“The Cult of the Nose” by Al Sarrantonio
You can find this story in the wonderful anthology titled simply Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Sarrantonio and featuring tales by both editors along with Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Michael Moorcock, Jodi Picoult, Diana Wynne-Jones, Jeffery Deaver and more. Some of the stories are scary, but all are wonderful. The one that affected me the most was Sarrantonio’s. It’s a simple tale of paranoia in which a man begins to see grinning, masked figures everywhere he looks, including historic paintings and photographs. It’s a story about the paranoia of always being watched, of always being closed in on by phantom shapes. In an age where privacy is ever-shrinking, it’s a tale that’s both highly contemporary and timeless, and it’s a deeply unsettling read.
So, with these random samplings at hand, we can conclude that…Well, this is embarrassing, but I don’t really seem to have a definite conclusion. Did I have that planned all along? Maybe. I’m a crafty little bugger. But perhaps it’s good we can’t arrive at a conclusion. It’s fortunate for readers that we can’t find a trend. There are too many trends in the realm of speculative fiction these days. Too many mash-ups, too many sparkly vampires and sensitive werewolves, too many perversions of things that used to be cool. It’s good that horror is still unpredictable. The field is not dead, but it has shrunk, shrunk to a band of writers who are doing it because they love it, because they’re really gifted. The future isn’t clear, but it is full of startling and wonderful possibilities. And for that, we can be thankful.
That being said, I’d like to say that it’s been a great pleasure to spend four weeks here at STACKED with all of you. I hope you enjoyed the experience as well, and I hope I can visit here again in the near future. In the meantime, please do participate in “All Hallows Read” should the spirits move you, and Happy Hallowe’en.

Guest Post: Horror Lit 101, Part the Third

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Guest blogger Matthew Jackson continues his series of posts for the month of October on horror literature. Today’s post is part three of four. Make sure you’ve read up on the entire series by reading the first installment here and the second installment here.

Horror Lit 101, Part the Third: In which we contemplate America’s Boogeyman and other modern monsters.

The 20th century added four new, powerful delivery systems for horror stories: radio, the motion picture, the comic book and the television. As with every other genre, this resulted in a kind of cultural overload. Suddenly the number of influences for aspiring storytellers was through the roof, and for many of our finest authors of modern horror fiction, these new mediums were an abundant source of inspiration.

We’ve talked about the roots of great horror, and the most influential early writers in the genre. This week we’ll cover some of the biggest names in horror fiction in the 20th century. Again we’ll cover essential works in their respective canons, why they’re important, and what they contribute overall to the genre. We will begin, as you might have guessed, with the King…

Stephen King (1947-)

Love him or loathe him, it’s hard to overestimate the cultural impact Stephen King has had over the past 35 years or so. Since his first novel Carrie was published in 1974 King has sold over 500 million books, and a quick search of the Internet will tell you that more than 50 feature film adaptations have been produced to date of various stories and characters from his work. Fifty movies. From one guy. And that’s not counting all the television miniseries and episodes, comic books, short films and other things that bear his mark.

In the 1980s, during the height of his commercial success, pretty much everyone with eyes was reading a King novel at some point, and not much has changed since then. His name alone is enough to send a volume to the top of the bestseller lists, a feat particularly impressive for someone who has been largely “typed” as a horror writer since the mid 70s (a designation that is to some extent unfair, we must all admit). Short of singular instances of pop culture explosion like Harry Potter and Twilight, Stephen King is pretty much the most successful writer of popular fiction who’s ever lived.

King’s immense popular appeal has been a subject of debate for even the writer himself, but the consensus seems to be that he’s sold so many books because he’s found a way to tap into a set of universal fears. Poe wrote macabre but often farfetched horror scenarios, and Lovecraft wrote about the discovering of big scary monsters. Cool, but not exactly relatable.

King, on the other hand, even when he’s at the height of sensationalism, always ties his fiction back to something a little more universal. The Shining is on the surface a haunted house/hotel novel, but it’s really a book about how people are haunted, and how our own misdeeds can follow us and drive us mad. Pet Sematary is a fairly simple story of a forbidden resurrection, but more importantly it’s about a deeply tragic loss and how far over the edge we might go if we had a chance to bring someone back (King found this book so disturbing that he didn’t originally intend to publish it.).
These subtexts may seem simple if you’re not familiar with the individual works, but believe me when I tell you that King’s great talent is to wrap his characters in these concepts, to make it permeate the manuscript, but not so much that it’s the only thing the book’s about. You have to walk a fine line in horror fiction, especially when you’re trying to make it do more than just be icky, and there is no one better than King.

He’s gotten more thematically complex in his later years, as exhibited by books like Desperation and Lisey’s Story. He still has the same knack for generating terrifying conceptual work, but he’s also grown as a writer, and how often can we say that for producers of commercial fiction? Don’t believe the critics. Hail to the King.

Essential Reading: King’s best novel by far is The Stand, a massive apocalyptic book about how the world ends that was written in the midst of the 1970s energy crisis but still holds relevance today. Other brilliant things include his “ultimate horror” novel It, his fantastic short fiction collection Night Shift and his 7-part epic The Dark Tower (not always horror, but it definitely bears mentioning). As far as nonfiction, pick up his Danse Macabre if you want to learn more about the horror genre than little old me could ever tell you, and his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft if you want to read the most useful and entertaining book about writing fiction that I’ve ever encountered.

Clive Barker (1952-)

We will continue with the man Stephen King once, in so many words, declared his successor. The quote “I have seen the future or horror and its name is Clive Barker,” attributed to King, was pasted on the front of Barker’s first books in the mid-1980s, and I’m sure it went a long way to selling a good deal more of them than Barker ever expected.

The only English writer I’ll mention in this post, Barker began his career as a playwright and theatrical producer before breaking into popular fiction with his enormously influential Books of Blood series beginning in 1984. Six volumes of these horror stories were published between 1984 and 1987, and they contain everything from serial killers to secret societies to werewolves to comically mischievous spirits. Barker earned a lot of critical and commercial attention for his use of graphic violence and sexuality in all of his stories, and was dubbed the new splatterpunk wunderkind.

To say these tales are important just because they’re courageously gross is a huge mistake. Barker ushered in a new way of thinking for horror fiction. While everyone around him was introducing monsters and then killing them, Barker was dreaming of perverse and often enlightening ways in which monsters could be embraced, a theme that runs through numerous Books of Blood tales like “The Life of Death,” “Dread” and even “Skins of the Fathers” (Is that a badass title, or isn’t it?). Barker’s stories were less about abolishing the alien and more about exploring how the alien is actually a part of us, and as an added bonus you get to read about buckets of blood. It’s not an overstatement to call his work a revolution in the horror world.

Essential Reading: Books of Blood are on top of the list, of course, but his first novel The Damnation Game is important for its new usage of Faustian archetypes, and his novella The Hellbound Heart (the basis for the classic film Hellraiser, which Barker directed) is a modernized horror fairy tale.

Richard Matheson (1926-)

Going backward a bit, we look at the author without whom there would probably be no Stephen King, or George A. Romero, or Anne Rice. Matheson was the king before King. His work launched subgenres, created new fears for the 20th Century and still has tremendous influence (as the success of the recent adaptation of his novel I Am Legend shows). Matheson wrote novels beyond the scope of past horror writers (with the exception of Lovecraft, of course).

I Am Legend is among the first apocalyptic horror novels, documenting the adventures of a man who believes he is the last human after everyone else has been taken over by a vampire-like virus. This story has been echoed over and over since, in films like Dawn of the Dead and novels like Stephen King’s Cell and Justin Cronin’s The Passage, which we’ll cover next week. Likewise his novel Hell House is in many ways the ultimate haunted house story. There’s nothing particularly insightful on a human level about Matheson’s work, but on the level of pure fun there’s no one better. He wrote the novels he knew horror fans wanted, and that’s why he’s great.

Essential Reading: I Am Legend and Hell House, of course, but also check out things like A Stir of Echoes and The Incredible Shrinking Man, not to mention his long list of short fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)

Yes, that’s the Joyce Carol Oates: National Book Award winner, Pulitzer nominee, literary legend and widely considered one of the great writers of our time. I’m not kidding. She’s a horror writer. No, seriously.

Anyone familiar with Oates’ work, even the really populist sort of stuff like We Were the Mulvaneys, knows that it’s perforated with very dark undertones. Many of her novels – My Sister, My Love, Black Water and Beasts, to name three – aren’t strictly horror, but they deal with horrific things in a very real and unpolished sense, and in that way they often become terrifying. She’s also a ridiculously adept practitioner of the Gothic tale, which isn’t horror but certainly specializes in the ominous.

Oates, like Cormac McCarthy, is among those wonderful writers of “serious” fiction who are far more concerned with their stories than with other people’s perception of their stories, therefore she’s a writer who uncompromisingly believes in the tale she’s telling, whether it’s scary or not. The result is a diverse body of work that includes numerous things that are either almost horror or just flat out horror. The world of popular speculative fiction got a little jolt in 1996 when Oates won the Bram Stoker Award (pretty much the highest prize you can get for a horror novel) for her book Zombie, a serial killer story based in large part on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Zombie is a first person narrative concerning a man who slowly gives over to his urges, drifting further and further away from a normal life as he begins taking young men back to his home and killing them, then making an attempt to turn them into his own private slaves by debilitating their brains (hence the title). It’s a horrifying idea made all the more horrifying by how deftly Oates gets into the head of this man, who goes nameless throughout the story. We always wonder how the guy next door becomes a killer, and countless pages of fiction have appeared trying to explain it. So far, only this one seems to come close.

Essential Reading: The aforementioned titles as well as her two anthologies of “Tales of the Grotesque,” Haunted and The Collector of Hearts.

Honorable Mentions (because I’ve rambled long enough.): Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, the entire body of work of Ramsey Campbell, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Dan Simmons’ The Terror and Carrion Comfort and of course the sublime and wonderful work of the great Harlan Ellison, including Deathbird Stories and the two legendary anthologies he edited: Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.

Once again, I could go on, but I’ve gone on quite long enough for one week. Hit up Google for a list of Bram Stoker Award winners and you’ll be off to the races with even more terrifying reads.

Tune in next week when we conclude this adventure with a look at contemporary horror…and a glimpse into the future.

Guest Post: Horror Lit 101, Part the Second

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Guest blogger Matthew Jackson continues his series of posts for the month of October on horror literature. Today’s post is part two of four. Make sure you’ve read up on the entire series by reading the first installment here.

Horror Lit 101, Part the Second: In which we discuss the Old Masters.

Modern horror fiction (as we know it, anyway) grew out of the murky, chaotic depths of the 19th century, when a few demented souls were churning out tales of things that go bump in the night. These writers were in many ways dubbed freaks in their age, and many of them are still freaks to us now. They broke taboos, they broke rules, they bent genres to the breaking point, and many of them died either broke, scorned or both, but in the process they gave birth to some of the great works in speculative fiction and many of the conventions that are now commonplace in horror tales.

There are innumerable minor writers within this movement (Algernon Blackwood for one, Arthur Machen for another), but for the sake of brevity (and clarity, as I’m sure I could bury this whole post in esoteric references to Victorian tales of the macabre if I weren’t careful), we’ll focus on four of the major authors, the household names. We’ll go in chronological order, beginning with the Big Three (Shelley, Poe and Stoker) and ending with the author I call The Bridge (that is, the link between the classics and the contemporaries), H. P. Lovecraft. Along the way we’ll visit the particularly bone-chilling details of their finest work, why it has survived so long, and what they contributed to the horror fiction we read today. First on the list, the young Englishwoman who breathed life into a mad scientist and his monster…

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

Book nerds regard the tale of how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus came to be as one of the great literary legends of all time. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, rented a house on Lake Geneva with George Gordon, Lord Byron. The trio passed many rainy nights reading German ghost stories aloud, and eventually Byron challenged each of them to conceive their own supernatural tale. Out of this grew Frankenstein (and, interestingly, a short story by Byron’s physician, John Polidori, that is among the first vampire tales written in English).

All critical relevance aside (and believe me, there’s a lot of it), why are we still so enthralled by a nearly 200-year-old tale of the living dead, especially when new tales of the living dead are popping up like hands in a graveyard? Well, the simplest answer is that we’re enthralled by Frankenstein because it’s enthralling. Shelley’s precise, almost clinical prose is remarkably atmospheric (I can still recall her description of the creature’s yellowy skin), and her tale is paced with all the explosive ferocity of a modern thriller.

More importantly, it’s one of the earliest tales to speak directly to one of our greatest fears: that our own bodies could be perverted into something horrible after we die. People always talk about this in broader terms, in terms of science wrecking the sanctity of life, but when you really get down to it, Frankenstein is scary because we imagine ourselves as the body on the slab, being chopped up and reassembled then pumped full of electricity until we’re a walking, talking shell of what we were, and worse, that we’re aware of it. (Shelley’s original monster learns to talk and think just like we do, which makes his experience all the more painful.) It’s a story of invasion, of bodily corruption, and you can find its descendants everywhere, from the films of David Cronenberg to the novels of Dan Simmons.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

For all the posturing the literary types like to do about Poe and his contributions to literature of the macabre, the guy wrote exploitation stories. He was a poet at heart, aching for personal losses and hopping from job to job in the publishing world while he tried to find something fulfilling amid alcoholism and depression. To help pay the bills, like so many writers before and after him, he turned to sensationalism. Lucky for us, he was good at it, and the results were among the most vivid and chilling horror tales ever written.

You’ve got your buried alive tale (“The Premature Burial”), your revenge tale (“The Cask of Amontillado)”, your torture tale (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), your plague tale (“The Masque of the Red Death”), your haunted house tale (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) and perhaps the most vivid of all, the internalized ghost story (“The Tell-Tale Heart”). It is the last of these that always struck me as the most effective, at least among Poe’s work. All of these stories are important to the genre. Many of them are flat out revolutionary, and have been imitated ever since (See Stephen King’s “Autopsy Room Four” as just one example.).

But there’s something about “The Tell-Tale Heart,” about the relentless psychological hell it seems to hurl into the reader’s head, that makes it stand out as a masterwork among masterworks. It speaks to the fear that we might lose control of the one thing we always thought we could manage: ourselves. We all have our own little bodies under the floorboards, and even if we’re not murderers, it’s a story that suggests we could be, which might be among the scariest feelings of all. Poe was a master at conveying this kind of internal torture, and for all the unapologetic sensationalism of his work, it’s that internalized agony that makes it all too real for us.

Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

Perhaps no single work of horror fiction has had greater impact on the genre than Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, Dracula. Published in 1897, it has been imitated thousands of times in book, film and television, and produced in Count Dracula perhaps the most iconic villain ever created, short of Satan.

Stoker wrote other horror novels, but Dracula stands out, both for its new treatment of the vampire (which up to that point had been a somewhat primitive Romanian folk tale), epistolary structure (it’s all told through letters and journal entries), and its symbolic complexity. Dracula is perhaps the first novel that presents a terror we’re not only afraid of, but also somewhat drawn to (hold that thought, because we’re going to talk about it a LOT more). Count Dracula is terrifying, true, but he’s also engaging, charming, and often quite literally spellbinding. Moreover, Stoker’s novel is dense with psychosexual subtext. The vampire is clearly is a dominant creature, forcing ladies like Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra to submit to his will, which just happens to be a form of penetration.

On the other hand you have Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire hunter obsessed with brutally staking (again, penetration) the phantoms in the night. It’s a novel filled with the savage heat that falls somewhere between sex and violence, about the taboo things that we don’t want to admit we desire, and it shook Victorian sensibilities (and undergarments) to their core. Of course, it’s also just a cool story about a monster, but try reading it the same way now that you’ve got all of that in your head.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

Another exploitation writer who made good, H. P. Lovecraft wrote fantastical monster stories and sold them to the pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Black Mask that dominated newsstands in the 1920s and 1930s. I call him The Bridge because he represents a sharp distinction between the writers that we’ve already discussed and the writers we’ve yet to discuss. With a few caveats, Shelley, Poe and Stoker all wrote tales about the evil that men (or monsters in the shape of men) do. Lovecraft, with his tales of incomprehensibly huge evils and demonic forces from beyond our understanding, wrote about the evil that men find.

He was not a great stylist by any means, and his dialogue is flat out terrible, but his “Cthulhu Mythos,” a series of tales in a subgenre he himself termed “cosmic horror,” are among the most influential of all modern horror fiction (Read “The Call of Cthulhu” as a starting point in this vast, irregular field of tales that now includes many writers). You can see the touch of Cthulhu (the name for the most famous of Lovecraft’s Old Gods) in Mike Mignola’s ongoing comic book Hellboy, in the stories of Stephen King and Clive Barker and in the films of no less than Steven Spielberg and James Cameron.

Lovecraft wrote stories supposing that great, hulking shapes lurked everywhere; in the depths of the ocean, in the farthest reaches of the stars, even in the earth beneath our homes. He crafted elaborate names for these beings, gave them human slaves and crafted tales of their unveiling in which reasonable men went mad when the discoveries became apparent. The fears in Lovecraft’s stories are all about the things we can’t see, can’t find and can’t understand. What if those things just beyond our understanding are best left there? What if we push the envelope of discovery a little too far and find something that will swallow us whole.

Lovecraft’s stories were perfect for a dawning scientific age, and in a time when we’re pushing further and further into our universe, they’re all the more relevant now. Some critics mock him, but someday when NASA points the Hubble at a distant star and a tentacled creature the size of Russia pops out, they’ll all have to eat their words…and their souls (evil laugh).

So, these are The Old Masters, the ones that came before. Next week, we’ll discuss the greats of contemporary fiction, why they’re great, and what fears they have unveiled.

Guest Post: Horror Lit 101, Part the First

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Our guest blogger today is Matthew Jackson, journalist, photographer, film critic, and Entertainment editor for the Huntsville Item, a newspaper in East Texas.  He’s also a tremendous book nerd and blogs about film, reading, and other nerdy (aka awesome) topics at A Walrus Darkly.  This is the first of four in a series of posts he’s written for STACKED on horror literature.
Horror Lit 101, Part the First: In which we speak a little about scary stories.
“All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear – an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We’re afraid of the body under the sheet. It’s our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction throughout the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.”     Stephen King
Scary stories are as old as dirt. Older, even. I think it highly likely that two amoebic organisms were floating around in some corner of the Primordial Ooze eons ago, discussing whether or not to migrate to some newer, slimier corner of the ooze, when one of them said to the other: “No, you don’t want to go in there. There’s bad stuff in there. Vinnie went in there and never came out.”
And yes, I know amoebas don’t normally talk (And that they’re not normally named Vinnie. Gordon is a far more likely name for a unicellular organism.). The point is that mysteries breed speculation, speculation breeds darkness, and that in turn breeds fear. Many of us get the same feeling when we enter our homes at night, and we’re alone, and the whole joint is plunged into some kind of epic blackness created just for the occasion of being alone at night.
We all know that the most likely thing to happen is that we’ll turn on the lights, and our house will be our house, and nothing will be out of the ordinary. But we also know that we could turn on our lights and find a person who shouldn’t be there sitting at the kitchen table, or that a grimacing, masked face is peering through the window. Or maybe we won’t even make it to the light switch; maybe some cold hand will wrap around our wrist and jerk us into the darkness…
These thoughts I just forced on you, like running into a cemetery at night and seeing which one of you can sit in a particular spot the longest, are all just a form of flirting with the darkness. We don’t actually want to go in. Of course we don’t. Not even the kids who wish a vampire would nibble at their jugular really want to go in. We just want to examine it, prod at it, turn it over in our heads. Some call it a subconscious desire to prepare for death, or to collect all these pieces of mysterious blackness in the hope that, when assembled as one, they’ll make some sense of all the ill in the world. Some label it instead a very conscious desire to thicken their own skin. Most of us just call it fun.
In honor of the coming of a Hallowe’en (Yes, I spell it like that, and yes, I’m OK with being slightly pretentious in this instance, thanks.), I’ll be traversing the landscape of horror fiction as I know it for the next four weeks, pointing out the best landmarks along the way and (I hope) providing a somewhat accurate picture of where the road goes from here. We’ll visit the classics: Poe, Stoker, Lovecraft and the like. We’ll visit the moderns: King, Barker, Bloch, Straub. We’ll even talk a bit about the current state of the genre, and hopefully point out some essential reading that will aid in October’s grim celebrations.
As for my qualifications, I can present (in addition to an English degree) only a rabid love of the genre, and a decade-long relationship with many of its best practitioners. Unlike many horror readers, who treat it like some sort of guilty pleasure, I make no apology for loving any of it, including the really farfetched stuff (One of my favorite Stephen King tales, “Battleground,” is about toy soldiers coming to life and attacking a hitman.). 
As for the snooty-minded who claim that “we can’t really call horror literature ‘literature’ at all, now can we, old chap,” I have only two responses. First, if you’re snooty-minded about this sort of thing you’re likely missing out on too many things to do anything more than claim knowledge of what you’re snooty about. And second, the purpose of good art, no matter how far out or freaky, is to call forth something universal about us. This might be as profound as our inherent loneliness in the world or as primitive as our inherent desire to boogie. The point is to get a rise. When it’s good, horror fiction will keep you up at night, fighting that anxious twitch in your stomach, reciting affirming mantras to wish away your terrors. When it’s great, horror fiction will simultaneously provoke both that anxious twitch and a deeper understanding, a sense of standing at the edge of the void and being exhilarated by how damn fragile everything is.
I promise that’s as far as I’ll venture into how profound and misunderstood the genre is, because the real point of consuming horror, or any other popular fiction, is to enjoy yourself, after all. So, no more ardent pontification on why it’s important, and much more ardent rambling about what among these works should be read, and why, and how (when it’s really great) horror fiction is the most exhilarating fiction there is.
We’ll get into that next week. But first, ground rules. We have a lot of ground to cover in a very short time. Whole books could be written about what I’m being asked to do in a few thousand words. So, I’m going to stick to a fairly strict interpretation of what horror fiction is. There will be no thriller fiction (which is meant to provide suspense more than terror), no science fiction (unless the focus is more on the monster and less on the machinery) and absolutely NO paranormal romance (Because fangs and mysterious brooding do not a monster make.) I’m boiling this down to the writers who set out to terrify us, to leave us worrying over every bump in the night; the writers who really and truly make it difficult to walk into your house alone.
So leave a light on, boys and girls. We have a dark journey ahead.