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Horror Author Roundtable
4.
AOTW: When did you know that you wanted to write horror stories? Tell us about your first attempts at writing horror fiction.
Gregory Maguire: I have never written anything considered "horror" until writing Lost a couple of years ago. That was my first attempt.
F. Paul Wilson: I wrote my first horror story when I was in second grade; it was about a haunted house. I'm hardwired for (to borrow from an old Welsh litany) "ghosties and goblins and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go thump in the night." As a kid I wanted to write horror stories; in 1959 I had an epiphany that convinced me I had to write horror stories. At age 13 I'd already run through everything overtly horrific in print, so I started on the Alfred Hitchcock collections. In 13 More Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do On TV, I came across Ray Bradbury's "The October Game," which left me gasping. I had to do to other people what Ray Bradbury had just done to me in that story.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: I came up with a semi science fiction, semi horror story when I was four, and I've kept at it ever since.
Geoffrey Huntington: I was inspired as a very young writer by the old gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, and wrote many stories based on the show's vampires, werewolves, witches and phoenixes on notebook paper and stapled down the side. I was seven. Then I wrote a sequel to the last of the Universal Frankenstein films; I was twelve.
Suzy McKee Charnas: I started late, having been preoccupied with certain more exploratory types of SF and fantasy writing for most of my career to date; but occasionally an idea just jumps into my head, and I can see that it's definitely the kernel of a horror story, and off we go. It feels like a welcome diversion from more central (to my purposes) work, with the opportunity to do a little subversion along the way; "Boobs" is meant to tie the violence of the werewolf in full cry to the real-world horror of school bullying. The Vampire Tapestry is a playful deconstruction of the whole vampire concept, more than a horror story in my view. So my motives are always much more mixed than a straightforward desire to "write a horror story."
Michael Norman: I don't write horror fiction. The ghost stories I recount unfolded in generally the manner I describe.
Fred Saberhagen: It was about 1974, and I was fairly well established in science fiction and fantasy, when I knew I wanted to write --- not horror, but a story about Dracula. This came about after rereading Stoker's classic and realizing that the central character was only rarely on stage. What was the Count really doing and thinking all that time? I had the feeling he was ready to dictate his memoirs to me.
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