​I didn't. At all.

Fantasy and science fiction were my first loves, and still my favorite genres to read. I grew up reading The Hobbit, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, watching any number of Godzilla movies or Dune, with Sting getting really hyped about stabbing Kyle MacLachlan. And yeah, so I read Stephen King's Dark Tower series, but that's still basically a King Arthur story with a heaping pile of weird fucked-up stuff shoveled on top. I mean...lobstrosities aside, I'm pretty sure there is a sixteen legged spider in the first book, and don't get me started on the Tick-Tock Man. Horror elements to be sure, but I was in it for the quest and the knights, for lack of a better term. The fantasy elements were what I was in it for, right? The horror was just kind of an add-on, but now, I'm here, having finished and submitted a horror novel, now working on its sequel, editing one kaiju story, and holding a horrific second kaiju story that quite literally came to me in a nightmare as my "on deck" project (Maybe writing it will make the bad dreams go away?), and a short story prequel to that, and I have to wonder. What the hell happened?

P.S. This post will break my attempt at staying PG-13. Not sorry. But a warning nonetheless. I didn't touch any of King's other works at the time, and was less than pleased upon being shown The Shining for the first time. Never really finished any horror book I picked up or was given. Not the Necroscope, or Anno Dracula, and I had difficulty really seeing Dracula as horror because the letter format put me off. I was supposed to read Frankenstein for school and, damn if it wasn't more letters. Even early in college it was Asimov, and Moorcock, and Sapkowski, not Barker, Chopin, or LaValle. I can't even remember finishing a horror novel until college. I think the first one I chose to read and actually finished was Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill. Scared the hell out of me, but I loved it. From then on, every so often I would pick up a horror novel, for flavor, but still stuck mostly to my mainstays.

Now, I'll play fair and admit that the first thing I wrote was a science fiction story. It will never see the light of day, at least not in any recognizable form. Not to say that it's bad, but to say that it is terrible. I can own that. I wrote it quick, and dirty, and with perhaps too many glasses of whiskey in my system. But it got me started writing again, And it showed me some of my strengths and weakness, so for that, I love it. The next thing I wrote didn't start as a horror novel either, not an any standard form. It was science fiction with a whole lot of anger about the racial issues of 2015 thrown in for good measure. Five years and uh, 6, I think, versions later, it's horror. Even in my completed kaiju novel, there are distinct elements of horror that I couldn't keep from popping up, despite the fact that it's written as an action based thriller.

Every time I've tried my hand at pure sci-fi or pure fantasy, my brain just stalls. I sit down at the computer, open the document, pour out a chapter, maybe two and then I hear the screeching sound of my mental emergency brakes grinding my process to a halt and there's just no unlocking them. Not even in a "writer's block" sort of way, I've mostly got a handle on knocking that crap aside and getting back to the work. It just doesn't work for me. Sometimes there's a reason: the world-building is all there and I don't want to go forward just dropping random things on the page like a drunk history professor stripping all melanin the dark ages with a metaphorical power washer. But other times, it just stops. I want to write it, but there's just something that won't let me. Give me a horror premise though, and it just...rolls onto the page. Fantasy horror, science-fiction horror, I poured my cereal and then realized we have no milk horror. It flows.

I have no problem with horror or writing horror. I've grown to love it, but I never thought it would be my thing. It wasn't me, or I couldn't take my brain to that dark place where Hill, Barker, LaValle, Du Maurier, and (Shirley) Jackson all get together and slice off chunks of spooky flesh to nourish their fright glands (I'm so sorry I said fright glands...twice now). And yet, the last two ideas I've had for stories have left my girlfriend looking at me like I handed her a shrunken head full of bees, so maybe it just took some time. Not to put myself on the level of any of those other writers, but just, maybe access to that place took a bit longer. So I started thinking, what changed? When did my knights and heroes get replaced with ghouls, goblins, and spiders that burrow into flesh? Did you think this post wouldn't be a list? So did I when I started, but lists help me organize my thoughts apparently. So this is what I can point to.

1) Heroes have changed.
I guess I was born around the time when heroes started to trade in their "good show, old chum" for the idea of Robert Pattinson laying his fists into a thug for two whole minutes before saying "I'm vengeance" in perhaps the best live action Batman voice so far. I'm not that old, let's be clear, but you know, late 90's early 00's, heroes started really taking on darker issues, and darker personas. The "modern" age of comics, if you will. Trading the idea of "a hero is a pinnacle of the people" for "heroes are inherently broken individuals" or perhaps, "heroes are still human, except for Superman who is basically human, but not".  I promise this isn't going to be a young old man screams at comics rant, because I do like modern comics...some of them. Immortal Hulk and Venom come to mind, as do the current runs on Batman and whatever the hell Dark Knights: Death Metal is supposed to be. Which, with those alone if you're up to day on comics, you'll probably notice something. All of these comics lean heavily into the horror genre. I mean Al Ewing has said that his run on Hulk was written to be a horror story, Venom is about a alien space symbiote that occasionally eats people and has also changed the origin of the symbiote to be less alien and more cosmic horror, Batman brought back the Joker, which is terrifying in its repetition (though, I'll admit, interesting take), and Death Metal now has a an all-powerful demon Batman/Joker hybrid running around and giving everyone cosmic anxiety. These are all super hero comics. But they are laced with horror, steeped in it even. But to be fair, I've also expanded the comics that I read, I love Swamp Thing, and John Constantine, and Doctor Fate. The more occult side of the DC Universe. Still heroes in their own way, but far more steeped in the dark and strange than their counterparts. So in that regard, while heroes overall have changed, my personal heroes have also changed and evolved over time. I've been reading comics for most of my life, so I've noticed the tonal shift, and since I still consume the media, it definitely has an impact on my writing. No reader escapes a story without carrying a piece of it with them.

2) Horror has been there all along
This one was fun to realize, and it's probably an already well understood point of view, but horror exists almost everywhere in fiction whether we actively notice it or not. I said before that there were elements of horror in The Gunslinger, and that they also crept into my action thriller novel, and thats normal. To point specifically back to things I mentioned in the intro: The Hobbit, and Dune (specifically the movie), will be easiest, and then I'll expand from there. Tolkien's The Hobbit isn't particularly scary on first glance, but I can point to two things in particular that are certainly in that vein: Riddles in the Dark, and just...the goblins/orcs in general. Gollum's introduction in the book is not scary per se, but the idea of a mutated creature, crawling around on rocks slick and slimy in the dark, eating raw fish and losing its absolute mind once it realizes that its "precious" was gone, sounds a lot more like a horror novel than a children's fantasy novel, doesn't it? Dune has the Shia-Hulud, as well as how...gruesome the Harkonnens are as people. They're monstrous. Horrific. I always am reminded of the scene in the movie where the Baron pulls out the servants heart-plug, just to watch him die and bask in the blood. Yeah, that's...that's horror guys. It's just wrapped up in a science fiction epic. 

With those out of the way, I want to bring up my favorite author: Neil Gaiman. When I tell people about him (those who don't already know), they ask me: What does he write? Or what type of books does he write? And I always struggle to answer that, because...what does he write? It's not fantasy, not really. But it's not magical realism, is it? Nor is it horror. But at the same time, it's all of those things. He threads elements of so many genres into each of his stories. It's impressive. One of the times I heard him speak, I submitted a question into the little ballot boxes, and he answered it. It went something like this:

Question: "What do you most prefer to write?"
Answer: "I prefer to write whatever the hell I want." 

That stuck with me, but at the time I don't think I quite got what he meant. I took it as him not wanting to be beholden to any kind of writing demands (ie. write a sequel to X), but looking back, I think it could also have meant that he didn't want to be pigeonholed into any one genre because that is inherently limiting to the act of story telling. To sit and say "this is science fiction, no, no, you can't have any horror here" as an example, can make a story feel less real. Space is scary, the future is scary. A glowing red eye powered by rage and dark magic that sends black hooded dead people riding fell-beast after you because he want's that ring so bad...is scary. Horror is like a blood red vein that courses inside of a story.

3) The world scares me now more than ever
If you don't like talking about the state of the real world, this point maybe isn't for you. Or perhaps you're the kind of person who needs to read this point the most. I don't know. But if you want to address the fact that things are bad and that the badness is affecting each and every one of us. Welcome. Here we go...

Holy fuck the world is on fire. Sometimes literally. Just burning around us. It's a shitshow, and currently, the inmates are running the asylum. Maybe that's always been the case, and its just now being dragged into the light, but fuck, it's hard to handle, and it's terrifying not knowing whether we're going to be okay.

But even more than that, he world is at a turning point. On one side is progress, and the difficult struggle of salvaging a broken world and turning it into something safe and kind and good for everyone, and on the other side is hell, definitely metaphorically, probably literally, I don't know. It'll be bad. For everyone. Whether they want to admit it or not. It's amazing the lengths people will go to, the damage they will inflict on themselves, just to spite other people. It's hard, waking up every morning and having to force yourself to hope, to not slip into fear and despair and resignation, to just look at the world and think "we're fucked". And that changes a person. Changes how you see things, and how you process them, and in turn, it would affect how you write. I mentioned that my first horror novel was started in 2015 and had a lot of my initial anger in it. Well, the world hasn't gotten any better since then, and that initial anger still burns, but now its fueled by fear. I'm afraid. And I'm angry. Not because I am afraid, but because I have to be afraid. The world as it is right now is worse than a horror story, because its real, and we don't know if the good guys are going to win. God, we hope they do, but we aren't sure and that's all the more terrifying. To quote from The Sandman, "What power would Hell have, if those imprisoned here were unable to dream of Heaven?" 

Writing is my passion, and its a reflection of me, and my beliefs and feelings, and so it's inevitable that all this horror will slip into my work. Imaginary monsters are less terrifying than the real ones, after all. More rational. But also, it's a catharsis. I take all the horror, all the what the fuck, and all the pain and anger and I bleed onto a page, in a form that I can control. The world's horror has crawled its way into my writing, but at the same time, it's made my writing more hopeful. The science fiction novel I said will never see the light of day was nihilistic, and not in the humorous laugh out loud style of Douglas Adams, it was bleak. Everyone lost, because inevitably, everyone loses. Deep, right? The things I've written since have been dark, scary, sad, difficult, even for me at times, but there's always a thread of hope. Because we need it. And with each finished story, each emotional release, I find it easier to do that. To hope. And I know that I want my writing to give people that same hope, despite all the fear and the horror, I want people to hope for good.

No matter what, keep hoping. Keep fucking hoping.