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Horror Author Roundtable
6.
AOTW: How do you decide how many graphic details to include in a scene? Do you worry about "going overboard" with the gore? Why or why not?
Geoffrey Huntington: To me, gore isn't scary. It's gross. A scene can be graphic if the plot demands it, but then move on, don't dwell on it. Stephen King is the master of this. A gross-out scene never lasts more than a few paragraphs.
F. Paul Wilson: I tend to go by the maxim that less, if done properly, is more. I've been through med school and a rotating internship that included surgery. I've dissected a human body and I've been up to my wrists in blood in someone's open abdomen. Blood and gore don't get to me. I'm more disturbed by what I don't see.
Remember the little girl in The Leopard Man banging on the door to her house to be let in because something was following her? Remember how you thought she'd get safely inside, but she didn't? Remember how she screamed and went silent? Remember the blood flowing under the door?
I do. And in my mind I saw worse things happening than Jacques Tourneur could ever have shown on the screen. I first saw that scene in the 1950s and I still haven't forgotten it.
Look at the aforementioned "The October Game" by Ray Bradbury. He doesn't describe the final scene. He ends the story with "Then . . . some idiot turned on the lights." He lets the reader imagine the horrific scene. It's devastating.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: It depends on the characters. If it is necessary for a character to go through something really distressing or violent or gory, then it has to be part of the story, or the story, in my experience, will grind to a halt.
Fred Saberhagen: I tend to be of the "less is more" school when it comes to gore. Then when it does burst out it has more power to shock. Going overboard in a story always reminds me of the Monty Python tea party, a parody of certain movies, where people stroll through a garden making chitchat while spouting blood like watering cans, with now and then a limb falling off. At the other extreme, there comes to mind one very genuinely scary movie, Ingmar Bergman's The Magician. Not a drop of gore, only a strange autopsy conducted in a quiet, dusty attic on a sunny summer afternoon.
Michael Norman: I describe only that which I've been able to document or that has been passed on to me by my interviewees.
Gregory Maguire: I have a tender sensibility toward gore. I am reading a fabulous new novel by Matthew Pearl, about to be published, called The Dante Club, and the gore is so specific, so literary, that it has several nights in a row ruined my sleep. He is a young writer and one to watch: I am not up to his level.
Suzy McKee Charnas: I do worry about it, in part because I personally am turned off by excessive gore. Not that I find it too awful, but that I get bored by it. I realized this when I found myself skimming and skipping a Stephen King novel --- it was Pet Cemetery, I think --- because the ripe and stinky horror stuff had come to feel like so much stuffing, and what was really wonderfully observed and written material, what kept me in the book at all, was the magnificent accuracy of King's ear for dialog and his sense of family interrelationships.
My own sense of this as a writer is that the carefully selected, precisely placed detail trips the reader's imagination in a way that just can't be matched by paragraphs of descriptions of flying entrails etc. I'm always looking for that little detail that will sink like a black hole into the depths of the reader's mind and then detonate down there, illuminating all sorts of stuff that is the reader's business, not mine. Hence, for example, the dogs that Kelsey eats in "Boobs." You'd be amazed at the amount of horrified reaction that this detail has brought me. Very gratifying.
Then there are other considerations: in The Furies, a book about an outright and very brutal war between remnant populations of men and women in a post-collapse future, I needed to indicate the extent of the fear and rage exploding on both sides by details of what the combatants do to each other, and it was very important to not fake it --- to not soft-pedal that kind of rage as we know of it in the real world, in order to be as true to it as I could be. So when a male prisoner acts up and shows signs of problematic leadership, the women's leader ropes him and drags him to death behind her horse, and that's a scene of horror, but it's also a scene of just retribution which I owed to female readers who have had the true horrors of real-life masculine violence effect their lives. Similarly, when there is a perfectly hideous gesture of rage in return from some of the men, that had to be shown as clearly and fully as I could do this, without turning the reader off so savagely that he or she would throw down the book swearing that nobody human could be that cruel. I also needed for the reader to understand that this violence was justified, if it can ever be justified, by the characters' pasts and their beliefs, so that they would remain human characters for the reader and not be dismissed as monsters.
So it depends on what you're trying to do with a particular piece of fiction. In that particular series, I was using horror to deliberately evoke the horrors of real life, not to entertain, and in that case I meant to affront the reader, to shock her.
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