Why Horror?

It's the question everyone asks. "You're nice and funny, kind to kids, animals and old people. You seem talented, why do you write..." -- there's usually an appalled snort here -- "...horror stories?" The simple answer is, horror can express truth about life in stories people can hear without judgment, layered with humor and insight. It's much the same thing I did writing television for children.

As a child, I lived a transient life filled with fear and uncertainty. Horror stories gave me worlds where pain ended, where fear could be overcome, where good guys won, and demons could be vanquished. Even if I had no control over my life, my heroes and heroines, as human as I, had control over theirs. In the pages of a book, comic, or late night monster movie marathons, my myths, fables and fairy tales -- in whatever form -- gave me hope.

There could be a simpler reason for why I write what I write. We lived in France for four years when I was a child, in the town of Evreux. Legend has it that a ghost named Gobelin haunted the village in the twelfth century, and the modern English word goblin is derived from that ghost's name. Maybe while I roamed the wild woods of Evreux, I had company...perhaps my literary voice is the goblin's parting gift to me.

If so, merci beaucoup, Gobelin!

To me, short stories are the hardest thing in the world to write. At best, writing one is a supreme act of surgical skill, slicing life open, locating and exposing the essentials, laying them bare in a brief flurry of words; at worst they can still be deft, deceptively clever as a card trick and every bit as flashy.

A novel allows the writer the luxury of more time to develop character, background, and growth; the short story has to do the same work in few enough pages to avoid turning into a novella. I have written dozens of short stories, but can only defend a handful. After years of wrestling with them, I finally have hope that I'm starting to get the idea, and some have made their way to print.

These are their stories...

PUBLISHED SHORT FICTION:

"Plaything"

My first published story, "Plaything" was about an attorney defending two men arrested for pedophilia with a robot that looks like an eight-year-old girl. It can be found in"Dark Dreams", Brandon Massey's acclaimed first anthology of horror and suspense stories exclusively by black writers including Zane, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes.

It was inspired by a New York Times article about the Supreme Court decision that a porn film featuring actresses dressed as minors couldn't be prosecuted under kiddie porn laws, because no actual minors were imvolved. I found myself conflicted between wanting prosecution for people who cater to that market, and my love of the freedom of speech that allows works of film and literary art like "Taxi Driver," "Lolita" and "Pretty Baby," that use the subject to enlighten us.

It's also a good example of how you can start out to write one thing and find when you're done that you've written something else entirely. I started on an essay based on the idea that human morality has to shift with advancing technology -- essentially that with the possibility of new vices, what we think is right and wrong has to change as well. When I got to the question of what sex with a robot girl would be, legally and morally, I ended up writing the story instead. All of my thoughts ended up in the heads and mouths of my characters, looking at the issue from all sides.

"The Share"

The second "Dark Dreams" anthology, "Voices from the Other Side," featured my take on a love story, "The Share", about a couple who share an apartment and much more than they intended. It was an idea I found in one of my old notebooks after Brandon asked me to contribute. The original story was built around a clever plot device that I kept, but finally found the point behind. It taught me that it's not the gimmick that makes the story, it's what the story is really about that works or doesn't.

"WET PAIN"

The third installment of "Dark Dreams" -- "Whispers in the Night" -- came out in July of 2007. It includes my novella, "WET PAIN", a ghost story about New Orleans that explores possible occult orgins of the Ku Klux Klan. It was inspired by a summer of long distance phone calls with a friend in Los Angelesin a year we were both having a hard time. I just took it to a horrifying extreme, and used the story to explore the nature of unorthodox friendships and the underside of human nature.

Publisher's Weekly had this to say about the new anthology in their May 2007 issue:

African-American horror writer and editor Massey has another slam dunk with his third Dark Dreams anthology (after 2006's Voices from the Other Side). Outstanding stories by returning contributors include Tananarive Due's "Summer," exploring a toddler's eerie possession; Robert Fleming's "The Wasp," a heartbreaking portrait of an abused wife; Chesya Burke's "My Sister's Keeper," examining a sister's terrifying choice; and the best of the bunch, Terence Taylor's brilliant discussion of racism, friendship and Hurricane Katrina in "WET PAIN."

To see the full Publisher's Weekly review of the anthology, click here and search the page for "Whispers in the Night".

"Sex Degrees of Separation"

This story was written for "To Be Left With the Body," an anthology of stories, poems and photos about black men and the HIV/AIDS pandemic 25 years in, produced by AIDS Project Los Angeles. This story was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe and a night out at a club with friends.

Steven Fullwood, the editor who invited me to contribute to the anthology, asked me for a scary story, but the end result was more ghostly. I felt that AIDS has written enough of its own horror stories. Instead of being afraid, I wanted to have a character take a nostalgic look back at the past and ahead to the future. I found my inspiration in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", about a nobleman who locks his castle doors and throws a masked ball while the plague rages outside his walls. In trying to hide from the horror outside, he discovers it's already among them.

I originally quoted Poe to introduce my story, and was convinced to drop the quote, but include the lines that inspired the story here:

"Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form."

- Edgar Allen Poe
"The Masque of the Red Death"

As more of my short stories becomes available, announcements will be posted here. E-mail me to be added to my mailing list.