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Tag: horror

  • 5 Steps to Writing Like Stephen King

    5 Steps to Writing Like Stephen King

    Wondering how to make your writing like Stephen King? One does not simply become, “The King of Horror,” because their surname is King, and their preferred genre is horror.

    No, King earned his title and a spot among the best horror authors by having over 60 books published, 350 million plus copies sold, and 12 Bram Stoker Awards in six different categories. But how?

    What makes this man’s writing so grand that he deserves a royal title and a kingdom all his own within our nightmares?

    Did he make some deal with the Devil that granted him incredible talent? Did he find a bottle washed up on Maine’s rocky shore, wipe the dust off the glass and unleash a djinn to grant his greatest desires?

    No, those tales are for the likes of fantasy.

    King, much like the majority of his work, took a realist approach towards success in his early years: He wrote every day. He stuffed countless rejection letters on a railroad spike as a reminder of his goals. He murdered his darlings with the pen as his scalpel. He left droplets of ink for us to follow, so that in five steps we could eke out our own existence in the grim dark world of nightmares to come.

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    Step 1 to Writing Like Stephen King: Write It Out, Then Pry it Out

    If a word is there just to dress up the page, rip it out. If you see an adverb, carve it out. If your voice becomes passive, shock it until it’s forced to stand out. King has a low tolerance for lengthy exposition with flowery prose, but that is because he prefers to tell it like it is, leaving none of the gritty details out.

    Don’t believe me? Then check out his memoir. 

    In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King states adverbs pave the road to hell, passive voice makes him want to scream and one of the worst things you can do for your writing is use large unfamiliar words that require the reader to pull a dictionary out. Therefore, the first step to learning to write like the King himself is taking the advice he has already doled out.

    Step 2 to Writing Like Stephen King: Actively Read

    King is a big proponent of reading often and reading actively.

    “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

    Stephen King, On Writing

    However, how does a writer read a book any differently than a voracious bibliophile who devours pages during all their waking hours?

    Did you notice that every sentence in the previous step ended with the word “out”? Did you ask why, or did you consider it a lack of foresight on my editor’s part? What if I told you that I crafted the repetition on purpose and with purpose?

    There is a literary device which specifically addresses the use of repetition denoted earlier. This obscure device, an epistrophe, is defined as the use of repetition at the end of a clause or sentence meant to further enhance the author’s idea, and King is no stranger to it or the many other literary tools that are planted throughout his books.

    Before he became a bestselling author, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in English in 1970 from the University of Maine, and in 1971 he began teaching English at Hampden Academy.

    During this time and onwards he observed what the novice, the up and coming and the best of the best printed out. He asked questions about what he witnessed. He kept what he liked and tossed out what he didn’t. Armed with newfound wisdom his writing style from the 70s shifted, and he gave up the role of an outsider in exchange for the knowledge of an insider who understands what makes a literary work a masterpiece.

    Step 3 to Writing like Stephen King: Don’t Steal the Reveal

    Of course, sometimes it’s not about what you see on the page, but rather what you don’t see on it that creates all the difference between writing that is good and writing that holds majesty. The King of Horror understands this, and it is something you can witness in all of his work whether you are reading his first book, Carrie or his latest novel Fairy Tale.

    What is this invisible force that slips between words and hides in the subtext?

    What keeps you reading this line and then moving on with haste to the next one?

    Tension.

    Tension is part of what makes great horror, and King is a master at implementing it. He stays in the present, occasionally visits the past but never rushes beyond a logical assumption when it concerns the narrative’s future.

    Then to move the story forward he shows rather than tells through the character’s dialogue, actions and perspective of the environment. In other words, he understands how syntax correlates to pacing, and how word choice influences perception.

    Step 4 to Writing Like Stephen King: Create a Relatable Protagonist and Promising Antagonist

    Notice I didn’t say likable.

    Let’s face it, everyone has flaws, and our flaws don’t necessarily make us the greatest people to be around. But our stress, our wrath, the skeletons in our closet which we prefer nobody knew about are more visible than we care to admit, especially when desperate times call for less desirable measures. The same should be said for our characters.

    What pushes the protagonist and antagonist to the end of their rope? What does the protagonist do that makes the reader say, “I would too?” How does the antagonist promise to retaliate? 

    The grotesque only appears when the audience relates to the character who is suffering. Give your protagonist relatable qualities, like David Drayton in The Mist, but also make sure they have whatever it takes to get through the hellscape the antagonist creates.

    The tension unfolds between the antagonist and protagonist when each character has a good reason to commit to their action. Make sure the antagonist follows through with their threats when their boundaries are pushed, like Annie Wilkes in Misery, but also make sure that those promises are founded in the logic of their pain. 

    King doesn’t hold back the punches, the amputations, or disembowelment. He tells it like it is in every detail. There is no such thing as mercy when it comes to the undoing of his characters.

    Horror reveals what our characters would do in the worst of times. We as authors, through our unapologetic hands, must break down the relatable image our characters have worked so hard to preserve, and shred the fibers beneath their facade to the point they can no longer deny the pain. Once they are stripped to the bare bones of their essence, then we get to see just how important society’s ethics and morals are. Then we get to address the real horrors of the world. 

    Step 5 to Writing Like Stephen King: Find the Grit in Reality

    Forget the rainbows and the sugar-coated crap of other genres. King’s work is littered with profanity, sardonic remarks, and dry wit. Page after page, he never lets you forget the copper taste of blood or irony that comes with the hard facts of what it is to live with a monster in your head.

    There is a little bit of ugly in everyone and everything, and with the right motivation anyone can do horrible things.

    King is a realist and no matter how you slice and dice his prose this is a truth he never shies from. Don’t coddle the audience, don’t think they can’t handle the truth. Rather document reality’s grit in all its shades of Gray, and let the page reveal It.

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  • How to Write Creepy Books for Adults

    How to Write Creepy Books for Adults

    Halloween has come and gone, but readers of all ages love to cozy up with a good horror book throughout the fall and winter. So why not try your hand at writing a creepy book

    People have been fascinated by creepy subject matter since… well, forever. Ghost stories have been around since people have, and it’s not hard to see why. Horror is a way for us to explore one of our most primal emotions—fear—and it’s a way for us to talk about subjects that are often taboo in regular conversation, like death.

    If you’re in the mood to write something scary this season, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll talk about what makes a book creepy, then we’ll walk you through the process of how to write creepy books.

    What makes a book creepy? (Things to consider)

    First and foremost, let’s clear something up: you don’t have to write a horror story to write a creepy story.

    Horror is a genre that intends to disgust or frighten the reader. The entire goal is to make the reader feel unpleasant. If you’re writing a horror novel, you want that at the forefront of your mind.

    However, not every book with scary elements is horror. Paranormal romance, for example, often includes frightening creatures or spooky settings, but the objective isn’t to scare the reader—it’s to tell a love story. The reader is meant to feel all the feelings they might get from a romance, just with a side of creepiness. For more on romance tropes, read this article.

    This is all to say that you can use these tips even if you’re not writing a straightforward horror novel. Got a fantasy adventure with a scene in which your characters have to crawl through a haunted dungeon? You’ll want to know how to write that haunted dungeon to its full creepy potential. Got an action thriller with a torture sequence? If you want it to land, you’ll need to know how to use suspense and how to write violent scenes.

    So, what makes a book creepy?

    Dark atmosphere and tone

    The atmosphere in your book is the mood you’re creating for the reader. You could say it’s the book’s ‘vibe.’ Atmosphere varies from chapter to chapter or scene to scene (this comes with emotional variance—some scenes will be happy, some will be sad, etc), but there’s still an overarching sense of atmosphere throughout a given novel.

    In order to manipulate your novel’s atmosphere, you have to manipulate your tone. Grammarly defines tone as “the attitude your words employ.” To explain this, let’s take a look at two examples.

    Example A: “Mike’s totally crazy. He totaled Dad’s car doing donuts in the Hobby Lobby parking lot last weekend, and honestly, it’ll be a surprise if Dad lets him off the hook this time.”

    This feels like someone telling you a story. The words here aren’t very formal, the sentences aren’t super complicated, and overall it reads casually. This is a conversational tone.

    Example B: “Mike’s madness settled. In the dim light of the Hobby Lobby parking lot, his tires squealed, circling like the crows dumpster-diving behind the adjacent Olive Garden. He should go home. He knows he should go home. But his father will be there, and this time, Mike’s not getting off the hook.”

    Okay, so the Hobby Lobby thing aside, this is a different vibe. Words like ‘madness’ and phrases like ‘dim light’ give this telling a more serious, creepy flavor. This is a sinister tone.

    To create a creepy atmosphere by using tone in your story, focus on sensory details and use figurative language to create associations with spooky stuff. Vary your sentence structure to add tension or drama. ‘Leaves crunched under their feet’ is okay, but ‘leaves crunched under their feet like broken teeth’ makes me think of chewing leaves or chewing broken teeth, and both are gross! Which is what we want.

    There are all kinds of literary devices that will help you develop your creative writing.

    Uncomfortable setting

    Another way to make your book creepy is to put your characters in an uncomfortable setting. You can do this the obvious way by putting your characters in a cold, damp, dark, generally claustrophobic environment, but they don’t have to be in a creepy cave or scary dungeon to have a terrible time.

    The setting should pose a problem for the characters. Maybe this is a beautiful home, but the people in it are kind of evil and scary. Maybe it’s a decent hotel room, but there’s no smoking allowed, and our protagonist is starting to yearn for a cigarette.

    Use the setting and the characters’ circumstances to layer discomfort until they’re swaddled in a thick, itchy blanket of misery.

    Paranormal activity

    Paranormal activity includes monsters, ghosts, the undead, spirits, demons, fairies, that kind of thing. The paranormal doesn’t have to be scary, but it definitely can be. If you’re including paranormal activity in your book, decide on the creature’s limitations and abilities and stick to them while you’re writing. This will keep your reader from getting confused and pulled out of the story by seemingly random, unexplained events or new powers coming out of nowhere.

    Nail-biting suspense

    Suspense is necessary for any storytelling—you’ll find a little suspense in most children’s books as well as books for adults. Suspense is what makes readers anticipate what’s coming up next, and if they don’t care, then they’re probably going to put the book down.

    Adding a ton of suspense, though, takes the reader past anticipation and into discomfort. It puts them on the edge of their seat and, ideally, they’re afraid of what’s going to happen next, but too invested to quit.

    How do you create this experience in the reader? It might seem difficult, but it’s a trick as old as time: setup and payoff.

    You want to establish the threat early on—in a horror story, this might be the opening scene where some unnamed character is murdered so we can see and fear the monster. Once you’ve set up the threat, you’ve done most of the work. The audience will be waiting for that threat to show up, and when it does, they’ll be both horrified and satisfied to see the setup paid off.

    You can play with suspense (and with setup and payoff) in other ways to unsettle the reader. Having things go not quite the way the reader expects them to will, in general, make them uncomfortable and eager to see the problem resolved. You just want to make sure that problem is resolved.

    Say your main character, Sarah, checks into a hotel. The staff all greet her warmly as “Paige.” When Sarah corrects them, the staff seem confused, and they don’t actually listen to her—they just keep calling her Paige.

    That’s kind of creepy—it’s definitely intriguing. Who’s Paige? Why are the staff so vehement about all this? We’re unsettled, and we want to know what’s going on. If we keep reading and the novelist never gives us any kind of a reason for why this is going on—in other words, it’s dropped—this immediately becomes frustrating because it’s a waste of time. There was no need for it—it didn’t matter to the story.

    How to write a creepy book

    Now that you know how writing creepy books works, you’re ready to get started on your own. We’re going to talk about the process from brainstorming all the way to revisions, so buckle up!

    Mindmap

    First, you’ll want to brainstorm—I suggest a mindmap. Mind Maps are word-association tools used to generate new ideas quickly, and they’re great for visual learners.

    To make one, find a mind-mapping software. Or, do it the old-fashioned way and write a word down in the center of a page. Write a line coming out from that word, and write something you might associate with it. We’re writing a creepy book, so we want things to stay on theme. If your first word is ‘nighttime,’ your associated words might be ‘haunting,’ ‘nightmare,’ ‘sleep paralysis demon,’ or ‘storm.’

    Do the same thing with those associated words until you’re all out of ideas. You should end up with what looks like a big web of ideas, images, characters, and plot points.

    Outline

    Take all the ideas, images, characters, and plot points you generated using your mind map and turn them into an outline.

    There are a few ways to go about this, none of them wrong: you might make a bullet-point list of the beats in your story, and you might include images or bits of dialogue as notes off to the side. An outline could be index cards taped to a piece of posterboard or to your wall, with each index card containing a nugget from your mind map.

    This is basically a guide for you to use while you’re drafting so that if you get stuck, lost, or scared, you’ve got a way to keep going instead of giving up. Do whatever works for you. Some people (myself included) like to do a combination brainstorm, outline, and rough draft—others find that separating these into different processes saves them time.

    Rough Draft

    With your outline handy to serve as your guide, you’re ready to start the drafting process. When you’re writing the rough draft of your novel, your objective is to complete the story as quickly as possible. 

    Pause as little as you can—if you hit a plot hole or unforeseen snag that threatens to stall the draft for days, if not weeks, make a note, accept that you’ll have to fix it later, and just move on to the next thing (that’s what your outline is for, remember?). If you think of a new idea, make a note (try a separate document or notebook if that helps to keep things sorted) and keep moving.

    Rough drafts do not need to be good—in fact, they’re not going to be. Any given rough draft is going to be almost entirely rewritten during revisions anyway. (I’m talking to myself a little bit, here, as someone who tends to let perfectionism hinder the actual completion of a draft.) Jane Smiley said that “every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist,” and she’s perfectly right.

    Revise

    Almost all of the writing process takes place in revisions. You’re going to rewrite almost everything you wrote in your rough draft several times. I don’t say this to overwhelm you, but rather to help you set reasonable expectations—this is going to take a while, and that’s normal.

    But how do you avoid endlessly rewriting, creating new problems, and working in circles?

    Keep your story top of mind. Your first few passes at revision should be about things like character’s motives, pacing, fixing plot holes—structural stuff. Are you setting up a good satisfying scare for your audience, and if so, are you paying it off later? Once you’ve got the structure down, you’ll start looking at word choice. Are you using tone to set a creepy atmosphere when you want to?

    While much of the drafting process is up to you, it is really recommended that you do structural edits before line edits. Otherwise, you could labor over sentences, paragraphs, pages, or even chapters that end up just getting deleted.

    Next Step

    Now that you know what makes a book creepy, and have an overview of how to write one, it’s time to get started. Check out this resource to help you take the next step.

    twl-fiction-prompts
  • 5 Tips for Writing Horror (+3 Things to Avoid)

    5 Tips for Writing Horror (+3 Things to Avoid)

    The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1764, is widely considered to be the first official horror novel. But horror stories, or at least ghost stories, go back as far as people do—scary folklore, folklore around death and the afterlife, and myths about horrible beasts, curses, and so on have been part of human storytelling from the start.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gotten any easier to write, though. Horror, in particular, can be extremely difficult to get just right. It’s often a fine line between scary and corny, and even if you’ve nailed it for one reader, you might have crossed it for others. How do you craft a story that’s guaranteed to be scary without making it cheesy? How do you make a horror story scary while keeping it believable?

    How do you write good horror?

    In this article, we’ll give you five tips for writing horror. We’re going to talk about what horror is, cover some subgenres of horror, talk about what to avoid when you’re writing horror, and give you some tools you can use to make your next horror story great.

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    What is Horror?

    Before we can really dig into writing horror, we need to understand what it is and how it functions as a genre. So what is horror, exactly?

    Wikipedia aptly sums horror up as “a genre of fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, or disgust.” It is “often divided into the subgenres of psychological horror and supernatural horror,” with the latter subgenre falling under the ‘speculative fiction’ umbrella.

    You may have a story that includes elements of horror, like suspense or supernatural happenings—take Twilight, for example. But these elements on their own don’t necessarily make a story horror if the story isn’t intended to scare the reader. Horror makes you (or is meant to make you) feel uneasy, disgusted, repulsed, and generally bad.

    Because horror draws on fear, which is a very primal human emotion, it can be a fascinating place to explore people’s opinions. You can learn a lot about a certain society or facet of society based on what they were publishing as horror at any given time.

    Dracula of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, was actually inspired by criminal anthropologists—he was meant to “look like” a criminal since they thought they could create a physical profile of common criminals. This tells us a lot about the society Dracula came out of, what they thought of crime, and how they approached solving it.

    Horror Subgenres

    When you set out to write horror, it’s important to know what subgenre you’re working in. Not only will this give you a place to start reading other horror novels (which you should definitely be doing—that’s the first unofficial tip), but it’ll give you a sense of what kinds of tropes and plot points readers will expect when they’re reading your work. Seeking out different subgenres will also help you find the perfect niche in which to work. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it covers the basics:

    1. Gothic fiction

    Gothic fiction is kind of the foundation for much of what we know as horror. This covers Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, and, of course, Bram Stoker. Gothic fiction includes many elements from romantic literature, so you’ll see a lot of people venturing into the foggy mist and happening upon something awful. Nature is meant to be a revealing force which makes people confront themselves—gothic literature is also generally very focused on the plights of the individual.

    2. Psychological horror

    Psychological horror is one of the two big subgenres we listed earlier. It doesn’t include supernatural elements, and it aims to uncover the disturbing depths of the human psyche. You’ll often see things like unreliable narrators in a psychological horror—an unreliable narrator is meant to make you question the events you’re witnessing, which puts you in an inherently uncomfortable and untrusting headspace where reality is constantly questioned.

    3. Supernatural/paranormal horror

    Supernatural/paranormal horror was the second big subgenre of horror, and, as you may have guessed, it’s horror that uses supernatural elements. Anything with ghosts, monsters, demons, magic, cryptids, or spirits is going to fall under this umbrella.

    4. Body horror

    BookRiot describes body horror as a subgenre focused on the mutilation or violation of the human body—you’ll see this combined with slashers, monster stories, zombie stories, and things of that sort. Frankenstein is a classic example.

    5. Splatterpunk

    Splatterpunk is a horror genre focused on extreme depictions of extreme violence. There’s often a ton of abuse, sexual violence, and things of that nature—nothing is off limits, and everything is intended to be as horrifically violent and gruesome as possible.

    6. Erotic horror

    Erotic horror is exactly what it sounds like. Where most horror aims to scare you, erotic horror also aims to, you know, excite the reader. Most erotica will do these through pretty conventional means, but erotic horror uses elements of horror combined with the regular stuff to get its readers going.

    What to Avoid When Writing Horror

    Now that we have a baseline understanding of what horror is and what kinds of horror there are to work with, let’s cover some general “don’ts” when it comes to writing horror.

    1. Violence for violence’s sake

    New horror writers sometimes have a tendency to confuse ‘intense’ with ‘scary.’ When writing in a subgenre like splatterpunk, you can definitely expect to see more taboo acts of violence written in more graphic detail than you might see elsewhere—unless you’re working in splatterpunk, though, you don’t necessarily always want to reach for the most disgusting thing to happen at all possible times.

    This isn’t for prudish reasons, either. It’s because while you want to scare your reader, you still want to tell a good story. If you’re trying to be as edgy as possible without thinking about what motivates these plot points, you’re probably losing track of your story, and that’s going to be frustrating for your reader. If the reader isn’t following along with the story, they’re not settled enough to be scared by your extreme violence—they’re probably just frustrated and trying to figure out how it fits into the narrative.

    2. Bad pacing

    Similarly, you want to avoid keeping your scariness level at a constant eleven out of ten. Again, intense doesn’t mean scary, and you can’t maintain a super high level of tension for very long without hitting the ceiling. You definitely want to keep the suspense at a constant simmer, but you also want dramatic contrast in your stories. Failing to provide this contrast will often mess with a reader’s suspension of disbelief, and instead of being stressed out, they’ll be bored.

    3. Lawless paranormal activity

    If there are paranormal elements in the story, you want to avoid having them be completely random and overpowered. If a ghost can do anything at any time with seemingly no limitations or motives, it might feel cheap to the reader. Similarly, if random paranormal events are happening without a clear motive other than ‘wouldn’t this be crazy/scary,’ readers might get confused or, again, bored, because they’re unclear what’s driving the action in the story.

    Tips for Writing Horror

    If you’ve found yourself doing some of the things we just talked about, don’t worry! We’re going to talk about how to correct these issues (and give a few extra tips for good measure).

    Be intentional with scary moments

    Instead of having scary things happen out of nowhere, or just because it seems shocking, ask yourself what’s motivating these moments. If you want to have your character stumble upon a dead body, that’s all well and good, but there should be some kind of reason for it. That dead body should matter to the story as a whole—nothing in a novel should happen once and then never matter at all for the rest of the read.

    Ask yourself these questions: how do your characters arrive at this moment? How do they deal with it? How does this moment affect the rest of the plot, or how does it set the characters up for their next move?

    Have rules for paranormal happenings

    You don’t need to explain the paranormal activity in your book to the reader, but you should understand how it works. Are there places a ghost can’t or won’t go? Why or why not? How do werewolves work in your book? Having these paranormal creatures act in a consistent way will make it easier to build suspense—it’s hard to get worried about your characters if it seems like they’re in the same amount of trouble all the time, and if there’s no way to tell what a ghost or monster is capable of, that trouble is hard to gauge.

    Use suspense

    Speaking of which!

    Suspense is your absolute best friend when you’re writing horror. Using it correctly means letting the reader know enough that they’re afraid, but not so much that they can tell what’s going to happen. It also means smart readers will probably be able to put it together before you want them to, but ideally, you’ll have written it so well that they don’t care if they can guess what happens next.

    Have rules for what everyone can do and set them up. Let’s say you’ve got a ghost who can walk through walls, and let’s say you’ve got a climax where the main characters are barricaded in a basement, thinking themselves safe at last. If you haven’t shown us that the ghost can walk through walls before now, it’ll kind of feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. It might still be scary, but it won’t feel earned.

    If, however, you’ve shown us early on that the ghost can walk through walls, the reader will be nervous the whole time those characters are in the basement. When is the ghost going to show up? We don’t know! This adds an immediate layer of tension.

    Use your characters

    Remember how I said that scary moments should be motivated? In most stories, characters drive the plot, not the other way around. Your characters, their specific fears, and their specific personalities should be at the center of your novel. Even if you have a horror story about an average guy dealing with a horrible situation, their averageness should matter. You also want the events of the story to be particularly frightening for your characters—it should draw on their fears.

    Ask yourself these questions when developing your characters: how would this specific character deal with this situation? How is this particularly scary for this particular character? What does this character learn about themselves as a result of this plot point?

    Don’t forget atmosphere and sensory detail

    Last, but certainly not least, don’t skip out on the setting. Horror relies on not just uncomfortable happenings, but an uncomfortable atmosphere—even in the lulls, we shouldn’t feel safe. Lean into this by describing the setting. Put your characters in crowded environments, smelly basements, dank corridors, etc. Describe these things using sense details that make the reader feel like they’re in it, too. This will amp up the overall sense of discomfort, and it’ll prime your reader to be startled by the next big scare you’ve got in store for them.

    Next step

    Now that you know what to do to write a good horror story (and you know what to avoid), it’s time to start writing your horror book.

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  • 17 of the Best Horror Authors to Inspire Your Writing

    17 of the Best Horror Authors to Inspire Your Writing

    There’s nothing quite like the feeling of reading an author whose writing is so good you can’t help but feel a little envious. The writers capable of making us fall in love with a genre as a reader are often the very same ones we look to for inspiration when we wish to try our hand at writing in that style. 

    From my perspective, one which I imagine many people reading this will share, Stephen King is the perfect example of an inspirational author who not only made me fall in love with reading the horror genre but made me want to write like him as well. Of course, the role Stephen King has played in my writing journey has been fulfilled by different authors for other writers.

    If you’re interested in writing horror fiction of your own, read on. We’ve rounded up a list of the best horror authors out there to inspire your work. Are you ready to discover your next favorite spooky scribe?

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    Stephen King

    Maybe his name meant being the king of horror was always his destiny, but it’s impossible to talk about scary authors without mentioning my personal favorite, Stephen King. Readers of different generations fall in love with King’s work, whether it happens to be his classic works of fiction such as The Shining, or more contemporary, fantasy, and sci-fi-influenced offerings such as Under The Dome. 

    Dean Koontz

    Along with King, Dean Koontz is one of the major names you’ll encounter should you check out the horror section in your local library or bookstore. Although he doesn’t label himself as a horror author, there’s no denying his skill at writing spine-chilling stories. If you’re new to Koontz and looking for some inspiration, check out The Eyes of Darkness for a creepy tale that many say predicted the Coronavirus pandemic. 

    Edgar Allen Poe

    As you’ll see, this list of horror authors is a mixture of contemporary favorites and all-time legends, and Edgar Allen Poe very much falls into the latter category. Considered by many the father of horror fiction, Poe’s ability to conjure up terrifying scenarios is almost unparalleled. Tributes as diverse as The Simpsons and the Insane Clown Posse have been paid to Poe’s mastery of horror fiction. Don’t miss out. If you’re new to Poe, pick up an anthology and dive right in to see how he can inspire your tales of terror.

    Anne Rice 

    Some authors are almost synonymous with an entire genre. For Anne Rice, that’s the case with vampire fiction. Before Twilight caught the attention of a younger generation of readers, Anne Rice was the only real show in town for epic stories of vampire horror and romance. Her books have been adapted into major Hollywood films as well as beloved roleplaying games. If you want to make your contribution to the vampire fiction genre, be sure to study the work of its true master, Anne Rice. 

    R.L Stine

    It would be a huge oversight to ignore the contributions of authors writing horror for a younger audience. After all, our schooldays are often the time of our lives we fall in love with horror fiction for life. For many of us, R.L Stine is the reason we love horror to this day. His prolific output and endless imagination mean many newcomers are still discovering the spooky brilliance of his Goosebumps books for the first time today. 

    Ray Bradbury

    Although Ray Bradbury is perhaps usually categorized as a writer of sci-fi or speculative fiction, there’s no denying his ability to conjure up a chilling tale. Something Wicked This Way Comes and the concept of the Dark Carnival lives on in the minds of horror lovers far after the final page has finished. If you want to learn how to generate terror and unease from the most mundane of regular situations, you could do a lot worse than looking at Bradbury. 

    Clive Barker

    Clive Barker is another true heavyweight of the horror world. While a lot of people will know him for the adaptions of his work, such as Candyman and Hellraiser, you’d be amiss to overlook the source material. Barker not only got respect and admiration from the top horror authors of the era, but he’s also a true creative powerhouse, also producing visual art that sends chills up the spine. Check out Barker’s books for inspiration on how to create immersive, conceptual works of horror. 

    William Peter Blatty

    Although William Petter Blatty’s books don’t always fall under the horror genre, the ones which do are so significant they can’t be overlooked. The Exorcist is, of course, the most prominent of these. The horror genre as a whole has been immeasurably influenced by The Exorcist. It’s hard to imagine the current crop of possession movies would ever have taken place without Blatty’s work. If you’re a fan of that style of supernatural horror, take the time to check out sequels such as Legion which are lesser known. 

    Bram Stoker

    We promised we’d pay tribute to the classics in this article, so you just know we had to give Bram Stoker his due recognition. Without Stoker’s Dracula, there would never have been Anne Rice or any of the more contemporary works of vampire fiction. Although Stoker wrote far more than just gothic and supernatural fiction, it’s impossible to write well in those genres without a solid appreciation of Dracula and other eerie tales like The Mystery of the Sea. 

    Peter Straub

    At the time of writing, Peter Straub recently passed away. However, there’s no doubt that his work will outlast him for generations to come. While many know Straub for his collaborations with Stephen King, his solo output is more than worthy of recognition. Straub’s strength was crafting works of chilling supernatural fiction, reflected by his large haul of Bram Stoker awards. Newcomers to Straub could check out one of his classic novels like Mr. X or start with a short story collection such as 5 Stories. 

    Shirley Jackson

    Shirley Jackson not only impacted the world of horror fiction during the time she was active but has continued to influence today’s authors as well as the media landscape in general through adaptations of her work. Her mystery fiction was just as well-received as her horror, and the influence of one on the other can be seen in the chilling atmosphere of surprise present in her work. Check out The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in The Castle for classic fiction from Jackson. 

    Jonathan Maberry

    Fans of contemporary horror shows on Netflix might be familiar with V Wars, but perhaps less show with the man behind the source material, Jonathan Maberry. If you want to learn how to create rich series of books full of worldbuilding and detail, you could do a lot worse than checking out Maberry. He’s also capable of crafting superb standalone stories, such as Ghostwalkers. 

    Mylo Carbia 

    As promised, we want to celebrate contemporary powerhouses of the horror genre as well as their classic forefathers. When it comes to major names that might still be under the radar for a lot of readers, there are few better than Mylo Carbia. Carbia was originally a screenwriter and her fiction reflects that ability to create gripping storylines that loom vividly in the mind of the reader. Check out Violets are Red for a fantastic blurring of the horror and thriller genres. 

    Ramsey Campbell 

    You might have noticed by now that the UK tends to punch above its weight when producing incredible horror authors relative to its population size. For one of the best of recent years, check out Ramsey Campbell. Campbell is quite prolific, having produced well over 30 books. However, he’s somewhat lesser known due to only having a few adapted for the screen. Ancient Images is a great starting point for his work, or try The Wise Friend for something newer. 

    Ania Ahlborn 

    If you’re looking for proof that self-published horror authors can go toe to toe with traditionally published authors, look no further than Ania Ahlborn. Ahlborn self-published her earliest novels and became the bestselling horror author on Amazon in the process. She’s since been adapted for the screen and has gone on to achieve bestseller status countless times. Check out her career for a blueprint of how to achieve horror success as a self-published writer. 

    Mary Shelley 

    Although we’re coming to the end of our list of the best horror authors to inspire your work, we’d be amiss to finish without taking a look at Mary Shelley. Shelley will always be associated with Frankenstein, but her influence on what later became science fiction shouldn’t be overlooked. Although you probably wouldn’t write in the same style as Shelley these days, you’d be a fool not to look at her mastery of mood, character, and scary storytelling. 

    Robert Bloch

    Robert Bloch is a name that a lot of people may not be familiar with, even if they know some of his most famous works. The movie Psycho is inexorably tied in with Hitchcock, but it was Bloch who provided the source material that would later be adapted. Bloch was a master at crafting psychologically disturbing tales that lingered for a long time in the mind of the reader. Study his work for clues on how to craft your disturbing works of fiction. 

    Are you ready to write your own horror?

    Now that you have plenty of inspiration for crafting your own spooky story, it’s time to take action!

    By all means, choose a few authors or books to read as research, but set yourself a deadline for getting started with the process of creating something for yourself. You might start with an outline or jump into working on a full first draft.

    Whichever route you choose, we wish you every success in your horror genre. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll be the inspiration for the next generation of horror authors!

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  • Horror Authors: How to Scare the Heck Out of Your Readers

    Horror Authors: How to Scare the Heck Out of Your Readers

    If you’re writing horror, dark fantasy, thrillers or anything else that requires suspense, a good jump-scare or anything that might terrorize your readers, you’ve probably already know that the written word can fill you with dread, and even startle you. Those feelings aren’t reserved for the movies.

    But how much study have you put into how your favorite horror authors have gone about scaring you with the written word?

    Movies rely on editing, music cues, performance, special visual and makeup effects . . . a whole parade of cinematic tools. But in prose all we have to work with are words, and our readers’ imaginations. The good news is that those are powerful tools.

    Though you may not have much control over any individual reader’s imagination, or his interpretation of your work, the ways you arrange words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs can activate your readers’ psyches in ways you may not have thought possible.

    It all comes down to breathing

    Even when reading silently, we tend to breathe along with what we’re reading as if we were reading it aloud. It’s impossible for us to turn certain parts of our brain off and when something causes us to start breathing differently, that forces us into different states. When you’re in a blind panic you tend to hyperventilate, breathing in quick, shallow gasps. When you’re nervous or anxious about something (the feeling of suspense), you tend to hold your breath, and breathe more slowly.

    The good news for horror and thriller authors is that these processes also work in reverse. If you can force that breathing state (or, more accurately, some smaller, less physically traumatic version of that state) in your readers, you’ll bring on the requisite psychological response.

    Evoking suspense and anxiety

    When you’re building suspense, evoking a feeling of impending doom or the terrifying fear of the unknown, get your reader to hold her breath. Stop her from taking her next breath for longer than normal. And though it may seem impossible to do this with words on a page, remember what I said about how we unconsciously breathe as though we’re reading aloud even when we aren’t.

    One of the reasons that sentences are finite is that the period at the end allows us a breath. Paragraphs give us a chance to take a deeper breath. So if you want your reader to slow her breathing and start feeling nervous, anxious or fearful, keep your sentences long, and your paragraphs even longer.

    Very near the beginning of Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House, the protagonist, Eleanor, is on her way to meet her fellow paranormal investigators at a house that’s known to be haunted. Though excited about being a part of something potentially important, and getting away from her dreary life in the city, Eleanor is terrified of what she’ll find there, not just from ghosts but as a result of what we’d now refer to as social anxiety. The closer she gets to the house, the more anxious she is.

    Jackson conveys this anxiety with a single paragraph wherein Eleanor makes a stop in a small town along the way and has a cup of coffee. It’s an innocuous scene, but told in a tight POV, it’s incredibly nerve-wracking. This single paragraph consists of ten sentences. The first of those sentences is the shortest at 28 words. The last is the longest at 52 words.

    Think about the last time you read, much less wrote, a sentence that’s 52 words long.

    By the end of that monster paragraph, Shirley Jackson left her readers gasping for air, and helped solidify The Haunting of Hill House as one of the undisputed classics of the genre.

    Eliciting horror and panic

    On the flip side, eventually the monster, serial killer or villain finally reveals himself and the terror (a generalized, creepy dread) turns to horror (the visceral reaction to a traumatic event in progress).

    Now you want to do just the opposite: Force your readers to breathe too often. Get them hyperventilating. Do this with short sentences. Even shorter paragraphs.

    One-sentence paragraphs.

    In another classic haunted house tale, Hell House, author Richard Matheson evokes this feeling of panic in one scene of nine paragraphs, each with no more than two short sentences. Readers have been trained to take a full breath after each paragraph, so breaths are coming fast and furious through:

    She stopped with a gasp and looked at the Spanish table.

    The telephone was ringing.

    It can’t, she thought. It hasn’t worked in more than thirty years.

    She wouldn’t answer it. She knew who it was.

    It kept on ringing, the shrill sounds stabbing at her eardrums, at her brain.

    She mustn’t answer it. She wouldn’t.

    The telephone kept ringing.

    “No,” she said.

    Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.

    I know — technically, that last paragraph has four sentences, but let’s consider that staccato stacking of “Ringing”s as one sentence with partial breaths between each word.

    Instead of a single ten-sentence-long paragraph, we have paragraphs of one or two sentences, with the longest sentence/paragraph clocking in at 14 words, or precisely half the length of Shirley Jackson’s shortest sentence.

    Following this scene, there are a couple of slightly longer paragraphs as the protagonist tries to take charge of the situation, but this is quickly dismissed by more staccato attacks on the senses. And, like The Haunting of Hill House, the ongoing success of Hell House is proof of its effectiveness.

    Putting this technique into practice

    This idea of controlling your readers’ breathing is not the be-all-end-all of “writing scary,” but with some practice it will work for you.

    And being aware of when to best use this strategy will also prevent you from overusing it, and move the majority of your prose somewhere into the readable, accessible, and comfortable center — until you want things to start getting scary again.

    Do you “write scary”? Have you tried this technique to control your reader’s breathing?