Part of the difficulty horror writing faces has to do with the defenses that modern readers bring to genre fiction. Like virtually every other genre, horror only came into its own as a discrete mode of fiction with the great literary branching that took place in the era of modern publishing. But we find elements of “horror” strewn throughout world literature — not just the near-ubiquitous tradition of ghostly folk tales but the canon too. How else would we describe Pentheus’s dismemberment at the hands of his own mother(!) at The Bacchae’s conclusion, or the myth of Perseus confronting the hideous Medusa, or Beowulf’s simultaneously erotic and horrific battle with Grendel’s mother deep under the earth, or Macbeth’s encounter with the three witches in some nightmarish version of the Scottish Highlands, and so on and so on. “Splatterpunk,” the bastard offspring subgenre of horror, is notorious for reveling in particularly graphic descriptions of torture and murder, but I doubt there’s much there that’s grislier than Dante’s depiction of the cannibal Count Ugolino gnawing upon the head of his own murderer, Archbishop Ruggieri, for all eternity.
When it comes to written horror, the shorter the better. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” T.S. Eliot famously wrote in The Waste Land a century ago. That poetic line still retains its fear-inducing power. Much of its effectiveness is due to its economy, which produces a sense of profound eeriness. The most effective horror writing shares something of its enigmatic compression. Indeed, as a genre, horror has always been best represented by short stories and novellas.
Only rarely are full-length novels able to sustain a sense of horror and dread over the long haul — a sense of familiarity sets in, and I suspect also that authors are less willing to deliver a truly nasty outcome to their characters at the end of a novel than a short story. Whether or not familiarity breeds contempt, the novel length has a tendency to normalize the uncanny. Sustaining that sense of the uncanny, of wrongness, across hundreds of pages is like telling a joke that lasts hours. One can see this effect at work in the doorstop novels of Stephen King, who, despite being far and away the most popular writer in the genre, only rarely manages to be truly frightening.
The Stand, which perennially tops the popular lists of all-time greatest novels and comes in at a mammoth 1,200 pages (in the uncut version), is as good an example as any. The first third, which details the collapse of American society as most of its population is wiped out by a bioengineered disease, is nightmarishly effective. But the entire world can only be killed so many times, and the longueur settles in after a while. This is not to say King never manages it, but most of his scariest work is to be found in the short stories, where the characters don’t get the chance to become irritating to the reader, and the writer displays a real zest for imaginative nastiness. (Just check out the “The Jaunt” if you don’t believe me.)
True, there are longer novels that manage to sustain the effect, like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game. But these are few and far between, and their formula is hard to distill. Ghost Story features a very King-ian mixture of the prosaic and the supernatural, but it maintains a powerful sense of the uncanny while ratcheting up to something believably terrifying. (It also has one of the more ingenious and disorienting opening passages in any work of genre fiction.) Meanwhile, Barker’s particular brand of eroticized horror mostly tends to be — how to put this? — pretentious and stupid, but he somehow pulled it together for his first novel, which is not just very, very well-written but simultaneously sad and frightening. It’s a brilliant twist on the devil’s bargain plotline, and the actual twist is delivered with remarkable subtlety.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is the Reddit phenomenon of two-sentence horror stories — e.g.: “The last man on earth sat alone in the room. There was a knock on the door.” These, however, are not so much scary Zen koans as they are a kind of kitsch, in which the striving for effect overtakes the demands of an internally compelling narrative.
The short story (and at most the novella) thus manages to hit the Goldilocks sweet spot. Everyone (rightly) knows Poe, an uncanny master. But just consider “The Wendigo,” “The Great God Pan,” “Casting the Runes, “The Veldt,” “The Summer People,” and the cycle of bizarre tales collected in “The King in Yellow” (which found a surprising new audience when its motifs were featured in the breakout first season of True Detective). Or think of how Robert Aickman’s genteel drawing-room setups grow steadily more eerie until the bottom drops out altogether. For that matter, look at Kafka’s terrifying yet strangely pathetic “In the Penal Colony.” And one hardly needs to mention Borges, whose “Book of Sand” doubles as a metaphor for this essay’s thesis. One could go on and on.
Why does it seem to work this way? Part of it is simply that fiction of any kind is a balancing act that grows harder the longer the tightrope walker has to go. And horror in particular, which always risks being merely ridiculous, the way nightmares seem in the light of day, requires preternatural control over style and tone such that the reader is led almost unaware up to the point at which the fantastical takes over.
For horror relies on what scholars call exformation — which is to say explicitly discarded information. We are these days positively deluged by prequels and backstories across every universe of imaginative fiction, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Harry Potter to Batman. Their exhaustive approach to mimetic fictional world building strips all the magic out. But as Patton Oswalt said, back when he was funny: We don’t care about where the things we love came from — we just want the things we love.
Thus, it is wholly irrelevant what Fortunato did to the mad narrator to merit his terrible fate in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” and a fulsome explanation would only unravel the story’s sense of creeping dread. What is the origin of the mysterious iridescent substance floating on the lake’s surface that kills off the protagonists so gruesomely in King’s “The Raft”? Who cares! It suffices that these and other stories have delighted and terrified (or vice versa) generations of readers looking for the masochistic thrill that horror fiction uniquely provides.
And to some degree, this is simply true of fiction: There is no substitute for a story that seems to want to be told. This is why George R.R. Martin can generate endless fake histories of Westeros without producing the enchantment that the early books in his series cast on their readers. Like Agent Mulder on The X-Files, we just want to believe.
To put it another way, the “horrific” is an inescapable part of existence — akin to, but distinct from, the tragic — and has duly found representation across human art. As with fantasy, science fiction, romance, thrillers, and so on, we have reified it into a genre, where it can be experienced with all the provisos and expectations the aware reader brings. The short story form short-circuits some of this cognitive process, infecting our consciousness before we have time to get our mental defenses up — or before we have time to break its spell. And isn’t a good scary story a kind of witchcraft?
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David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.