Nightmare Magazine Issue 4 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, horror
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, raised in Daytona Beach, Florida, Lucius Shepard has won the Hugo, Nebula, Word Fantasy, the Shirley Jackson, the Sturgeon, et al for his fiction. He has lived all over the world but currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Forthcoming are The Dragon Griaule and a novella collection, Five Autobiographies.

The H Word: Choosing Gruesome Subjects

John Langan

That I write horror fiction is not something my wife has ever questioned. Nor has either of my sons asked me to explain the field in which I work. It was my mother who asked me about my fiction, though she did so only recently. We were at a dinner party with another horror writer, and as the plates for the main course were being cleared, my mom turned to him and asked where he derived his inspiration from. As he started to reply, I noticed her eyes dart to me, and widen slightly with alarm as she realized that she had put to him a question she’d never asked me. (She’s a good mom, conscientious about that kind of thing.) So once my friend was done giving his answer, she turned to me and repeated her question. I mumbled a response which I can’t really remember, but which I was aware was neither interesting nor all that accurate. My mom didn’t hold it against me, and soon we were eating the dessert she’d provided.

It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked, “Why do you write that stuff?” It’s typically been voiced by those who are friendly to me but not particularly close: colleagues at the school where I teach; the parents of my younger son’s classmates; the people who stop to talk to me at bookstores or libraries or conventions, when I’m signing books or after I’ve finished giving a reading or sitting on a panel. After years of hearing this, I still don’t have a good answer.

Of course, who says you need one? As a friend of mine with whom I’ve discussed the matter says, “What does it matter why you write it? If people like to read it, shouldn’t that be what matters?” Perhaps it should. I can’t help seeing the question, though, as the other half of one that seems to be floated online on a fairly regular basis, namely, a concern for the nature (and purpose) or horror fiction. (Recently, Richard Gavin undertook to address this question on the blog The Teeming Brain [tinyurl.com/gavin-horror].) If we’re interested in what horror fiction does, then it makes a certain amount of sense that we would be interested in where it comes from.

In thinking about this question, I went to my bookshelf, and found that, as usual, Stephen King had been there first. In the foreword to his 1978 collection, Night Shift, he writes about the question that he, as a writer of horror fiction, is asked most frequently: “Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects?” He answers this question with one of his own: “Why do

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