“The horror …. The horror”.
“The horror …… The horror.”
(Courtesy of Colonel Kurtz, “Apocalypse Now”)
So, why am I inclined more to writing horror stories?
I suppose one reason would be that the possibilities within this particular genre are infinite; no rules, no restrictions and no boundaries. Party time!
Perhaps the ultimate skill of the best of the horror writers is that they strive to make the impossible appear possible, and the unbelievable to come across as believable.
Let’s look at an all-time classic, Mary Shelley’s ‘FRANKENSTEIN’. The reason I pick this great work will soon become quite obvious.
Some might say the text was a little too flowery, even OTT. However, certainly the circles in which she moved, it was hardly surprising, with the great poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Lord Byron for company. The former also being, of course, Mary’s husband.
The background for Mary’s inspired Gothic horror was substance enough for inspiration. Electricity had been discovered and, amongst other things, the Medical fraternity was experimenting with the new ‘power source’. Such included passing bursts of electricity through severed limbs and whole bodies of dead animals. Then likewise, with the detached limbs and whole bodies of dead human beings. Madness, in the guise of medical research and advancement. The more deluded believing they were restoring life to things dead when, in truth, they were simply producing little more than reflex responses, stimulated into being by the electrical currents being passed through the dead flesh, muscle, sinew and tissues. What real material to fire an already ripe and eager imagination!
In the Forward pages to Robert C. W. Ettinger’s ‘Prospects of Immortality’, he dealt with two specific things, one being the use of Cryogenics within the science of Medicine.
For Mary Shelley, electricity was the launch pad for Doctor Frankenstein. In my modern, parallel story, ‘PROMETHEUS ASCENDING’, Cryogenics was the launch pad for the neurosurgeon, Carvel. Whilst Mary’s vision of Hell is still a nightmare some way off, waiting to become probable, what is addressed in ‘PROMETHEUS ASCENDING’ is already much closer. With every passing year, it moves closer to the realm of clear and present nightmare, and a not too far distant reality. The improbable made probable; the unbelievable made believable.
In quite deliberately writing fantasy horror (as opposed to the genuine horrors within the real world), most still try to give their works a substance, a reality amidst the unreality of the stories they write, even a certain respectability. Explained in a more immediate, basic level, not taking the reader to be a fool to be fooled.
Taking a step back ….. horror can also be fun, of course, as I hope some of my ‘BoCheK Tales’ show.
For now, sleep well, or at least as well as the dark of the night and your imagination will allow.
PT
(William P Thomson)
William P Thomson 