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AOTW: Do you look to your own phobias to find subject matter? Are your stories the products of nightmares, childhood experiences, fantasies, or do they come straight from the headlines of contemporary events or other experiences?
Whitley Strieber: I am my subject matter. My fiction is a journey into my own being, in search of truth. I have led an extremely strange life and live with the feeling that, if I could just open the door, a whole hidden set of memories would unfold. These memories haunt my dreams in the form of spectral stories that my unconscious mind tells itself, stories that I believe have a profound connection to the truth about our lives and our world, a truth that I do not believe we know consciously. A human being is a darling little ship sailing a black and storm-stalked ocean, sailing way out beyond land...and our whole world is the little ship, and we are all her captains and her mates, raising the painted sails and heading with the wind outward. But then the truth: we are not the ship, we are not the seamen. They are only the dream that we dream of ourselves. We are, each and all of us, the great night ocean. Our truth swims in the shadow of Leviathan, flickers in the lightning the fleetly guides us.
Tananarive Due: I suppose all of us, to one degree or another, are writing about our phobias. My big one, from the time I can remember, has been fear of death. Over time, that has transformed into fear of loss, which was the basis of my novel My Soul to Keep. For my next horror book, I want to write about a haunted house, which will probe back again to old phobias, that childhood fear that there is something in the closet or that my dolls will suddenly spring to life. But I also plan to incorporate some of the real-life horrors of people I've known and a local news story about a very strange incident involving a man fishing with his son that totally weirded me out. Everything becomes fodder for stories. If it scares me, I file it away for future use.
Darren Shan: Oh yes!! I've always been a bit nervous around spiders, which is why I chose to include Madam Octa in Cirque Du Freak. If a writer's scared of something himself, it's very easy to find the terrifying element of it. I think lots of horror writers write about their phobias --- the most famous probably being Edgar Allen Poe, who was more than slightly worried about the possibility of being buried alive. (I don't think he'd have enjoyed Darren's "beneath the earth" experience in Cirque Du Freak!)
Christopher Schildt: My stories are a combination of all these things, phobias, childhood experiences, fantasies, and today's headlines. All these experiences play a relevant part in fleshing out the story. There is no one particular aspect that makes the story come alive.
Douglas Clegg: My stories are completely from my understandings or misunderstandings of the world. I think life is a great disturbance within a field of geologic time. Part of being human is trying to balance the contradictions in life, or to not balance them and let them all fall apart. I think horror fiction comes from a sense that there is something beneath the fabric of what we see before us --- something perhaps a little dreadful --- and the human condition is to somehow explore that. But that's fairly abstract: basically, I'm a left-hander, and I knew from an early age that the world was not made for me, but for all you right-handers. So I write horror fiction from my left-handed, skewed perspective. As a child, I loved and feared nightmares and, as an adult, I welcome them at night. They're adventures that take us out of the comfortable, safe, and perhaps false world into the world of genuine confrontation.
What I love about horror fiction is that it is both serious and escapist at the same time --- thus, I'd avoid headlines and provide a safe harbor for a reader directly into a nightmare.
Ameilia Atwater-Rhodes: Personally, I avoid my own phobias as much as I can when writing --- which is one of my reasons for my genre. My stories are products of "what if" combined with a little dreaming and a lot of observation of people. More than once, I have taken someone else's phobias and inserted that into a book I was writing. However, when I find myself writing about something that scares me personally, I usually back off. I may write horror, but I still write to escape.
David Searcy: I look to my phobias for peace and comfort. For scary stories I look to theory and in theory (I like to think) any story, ultimately, is a scary story, wants to be a scary story, derives from the impulse to tell a scary story. Any Care Bear episode you choose, I imagine, traces its lineage pretty directly back to some cold, dark ground with terrified, fire-lit children. Forget all that tragic, comic, epic, and lyric stuff. There's only scary.
Kelley Armstrong: If I ever used my phobias and nightmares as the basis of a novel, I'd bore people, not scare them. Very pedestrian stuff. I get most of my ideas from things I read, see, hear, etc. Just a line or two might spark an idea that I write down for later. I decided to write Bitten after seeing a disappointing werewolf portrayal on television. The idea for my third novel came from a comment I overheard while visiting Salem last summer. Simple things, but my mind seizes them and runs wild with the possibilities.
R.L. Stine: I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams. One night I dreamed I was making a bologna sandwich. That was a really exciting dream for me. I was a very fearful child, and when I write I try to remember that feeling of panic. I try to remember what it was like being a kid afraid of the dark, afraid something is lurking in the basement, etc.
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