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Horror Author Roundtable
1.
AOTW: How do you personally define "horror?"
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: Horror, according to the Greeks, is fear of the unknown, as terror is fear of the known. I think that the high degree of ambiguity that is the hallmark of good horror fiction is the result of that unknownness.
Suzy McKee Charnas: Not sure I can, but: to me, there is real horror, the stuff you feel when you read about, say, the Columbine massacre, or the rising statistics on routine torture at the hands of police around the world, or the destruction of the US Constitution (amid much else) by the Right wing currently in power in this country. Then there's the rather delicious dread of anticipation you feel when you watch a splatter flick or read the work of a master when it's a true master, such as, say, M.R. James, you get the feeling of having had a sudden glimpse into a dimension in which everything is dark and as awful as it could possibly be, but it's not real and you know it's not real; it's just entertainment, a whole different ball game.
F. Paul Wilson: I assume we're talking fiction here, not a political fundraising dinner or clothes shopping with my wife. Horror fiction can shock, disgust, and frighten. But at its heart, horror fiction unsettles and disturbs.
Fred Saberhagen: It seems a combination of fear and revulsion. Something that we can be fascinated by, as long as it's in a cage.
Geoffrey Huntington: Horror, for me, has to have an element of fantasy to it. The nightly news is horrific; terrorism elicits a horror response. But when I write horror, or read horror, or watch horror, there needs to be something that separates it from the all-too-real horrors we live with, something that takes the story outside the realm of everyday reality. A vampire, a time warp, a vengeful walking corpse --- these are what I need to define "horror."
Michael Norman: An indefinable dread that something is not quite right here and then worms its way into your subconscious --- what is imagined is infinitely more frightening that anything portrayed on page or screen.
Gregory Maguire: Horror, to me, comes down to one thing: that moment of realization that something is not as it seemed --- I mean dangerously so, of course. Horror is built on instants of apprehension: That the creak of spring in the car's back seat means someone is sitting there. That's the horror moment: The subsequent attack and possible escape is just narrative folderol, needing to be got through just like the nine choruses of a musical number ending Act One.
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