Compass Points - Horror Upon Horror: A Step by Step Guide to Writing a Horror Novel - Softcover

Ruthven, Suzanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178279266X ISBN 13: 9781782792666

Publisher: Compass Books, 2013

Synopsis

The horror novel has often been looked upon as the poor relation in the literary world, and yet some of our greatest writers have published novels under its banner. Horror writer (Whittlewood and The Wild Horseman) and former Gothic Society member, Suzanne Ruthven brings us a step-by-step guide to writing horror fiction.

About this title

About the Author

In addition to being the commissioning editor for Compass Books, Suzanne Ruthven is also editor of the popular quarterly creative writing magazine, The New Writer (which she produces in partnership with literary agent, and publisher, Merric Davidson). She lives in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Compass Points Horror upon Horror

Researching and Writing the Horror Novel

By Suzanne Ruthven

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 Suzanne Ruthven
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-266-6

Contents

Chapter One: Tales of the Dead.............................................
1
Chapter Two: The Gothic Horror Show........................................
11
Chapter Three: The Vampyre.................................................
21
Chapter Four: Fakelore and Fantasy.........................................
30
Chapter Five: Chimera......................................................
45
Chapter Six: The Twilight World............................................
57
Chapter Seven: Nature's Own................................................
67
Cosmic Egg publisher's interview...........................................
79
Conclusion.................................................................
82

CHAPTER 1

Tales of the Dead

"The time has come to talk of terror and horror," observed theacademic authors of In Search of Dracula, Dr Raymond McNallyand Professor Radu Florescu. "Strictly speaking they are twodifferent things – but, of course, we seldom speak strictly! Bothare responses to the frightful thing, person, deed or circumstance.But terror is the extreme rational fear of some acceptedform of reality, whereas horror is extreme irrational fear of theutterly unnatural or the supernatural. Moreover, there is realistichorror – the unnatural or supernatural fright presented in theguise of the normal. Terror is also the dread of the use ofsystematic violence; horror the dread of something unpredictable,soothing that may have a potential for violence."

In many instances, however, our concept of a favourite horrorstory comes from a screenplay rather than the original novel,which is a completely different discipline. Many a reader hasreceived a shock when discovering that the novel (often readafter a cinema or television success), is a drastic departure fromthe film version. Characters are merged or omitted altogether;locations are altered; new scenes are invented for dramaticimpact; and in a large number of cases, the ending is nothing likethe novelist's conclusion to the story. Novels are frequentlyadapted for films and frequently include material that was notpart of the original narrative but a film is a film, and a novel is anovel – each being viewed as separate art forms. So, for the timebeing we must forget about the film versions and concentrate onwriting a novel.

To fully understand the horror novel, would-be novelists inthe genre are advised to familiarise themselves with the developmentof the style from the classic German Gespensterbuch to thecontemporary Twilight series, to see what makes the horror novelfan-base tick. The appeal of traditional ghost stories is probablyas old as the first time humans gathered together around a fire tolisten to tales of long-dead ancestors. The flickering shadows onthe walls, the enveloping darkness outside, and the sounds ofpredatory night creatures would have all added to the atmosphere.A log falling unexpectedly from the flames in a shower ofsparks would have sent shivers of fear along the spines of thelisteners as they hung on every word ...

... moving down through the ages we come to the famouscollection of ghost stories from the Villa Diadoti that inspired thecreators of the modern genre. Everyone is familiar with thehistory:

The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowdedaround a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves withsome German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into ourhands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Twoother friends ... and myself agreed to write a story, founded on somesupernatural occurrence ...

So recorded Percy Shelley in the 'anonymous' preface to the firstedition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. Mary herselfrecalled the same collection when she came to write a preface forthe revised edition of her novel and although the stories made"so powerful an impression on Mary Shelley that she could recallincidents which occurred in them fifteen years later, no-one hasuntil now thought fit to reprint either the French or the Englisheditions," observed Dr Terry Hale of the Performance TranslationCentre at the University of Hull, in the 1992 translation publishedby the Gothic Society.

The original German collection, Gespensterbuch, first saw thelight of day between 1811 and 1815, with the French version,Fantasmagoriana published in 1812; and an English version, Talesof the Dead, appearing the following year. These German'shudder' stories had a tremendous influence on the developmentof the English Gothic literary genre and according to DrHale, "frequently employed traditional folk-motifs coupled withincreasingly sophisticated narrative techniques". A techniquethat is still highly identifiable in the genre in the twentiethcentury – but from that 'wet, ungenial summer' also sprung theindependent trains of thought that gave the world two of itsmost terrifying Gothic creations – Dr Frankenstein's monsterand, subsequently, the charismatic vampire, Count Dracula.

The traditional ghost story, however, is usually based on someform of revenge or retribution from beyond the grave, andwhereas contemporary writers have moved on from the classical'moaning in the passages' and 'clanking chains', the narrativemust still produce that involuntary 'shudder factor' in thereader. It is a scenario that bridges generations, just as the 1898novella, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James partly inspired thescreenplay for the psychological horror film The Others (2001). Itis also the one of the most 'respectable' elements of the horrorgenre in that ghost stories have graced the pages of the mostsurprising of mainstream magazines at one time or another,including an edition of Practical Fishkeeping!

By definition, however, a ghost story should be any piece offiction, ballad or drama, or an account of an experience, thatincludes a ghost, or simply has all the appearances of a haunting.Wikipedia, for example, tells us: "In a narrower sense, the ghoststory has been developed as a short story format, within genrefiction. It is a form of supernatural fiction and specifically ofweird fiction, and is often a horror story. While ghost stories areoften explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serveall sorts of purposes, from comedy to morality tales. Ghosts oftenappear in the narrative as sentinels or prophets of things tocome. Whatever their uses the ghost story is in some formatpresent in all cultures around the world, and may be passeddown orally or in written form."

Literary scholar and historian of the ghost story Jack Sullivan,observes that many literary experts claim a 'Golden Age of theGhost Story' existed between the decline of the Gothic novel inthe 1830s and the start of the First World War. Sullivan's opinionis that the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanuushered in the 'Golden Age' – but fails to acknowledge ArthurMachen's contribution to the genre, especially his ghostly tale ofThe Bowmen, that actually inspired the WWI legend of the Angelsof Mons. Sullivan is one of the leading modern figures in thestudy of the horror genre, particularly the ghost story, andprobably his most important contribution to the historical studyof the genre to date has been the mammoth The PenguinEncyclopaedia of Horror and the Supernatural, which should be onevery horror writer's bookshelf.

Nevertheless every location on earth has its ghost story to tell,its haunted house, local superstition or folklore that can bedrawn upon to enrich a fictional tale, from Shakespeare's Hamlet(1603), to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles(1902) – which was listed on the BBC's 'The Big Read' poll as the'UK's best-loved novel' – and The Amityville Horror, an Americanbest-selling novel (1977) by Jay Anson. On a more personal andfactual front, Passenham Manor in Buckinghamshire has its own'Bobby' Bannister whose memory is preserved as 'an oppressivetyrant whose ghost still lingers on,' (Passenham: A History of aForest Village), having broken his neck in the hunting field and thehorse dragging his mangled body home.

Perhaps the longest running ghost story theme, using the ideaof ancestral haunting, is the animated portrait ... first introducedin The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764. Generallyregarded as the first Gothic novel and a major literary influencefor Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Edgar AllanPoe, the author uses the device of "the portrait of his grandfatherwhich hung over the bench where they had been sitting uttered adeep sigh and heaved its breast ..." thus preventing aravishment that while not incestuous was certainly on theborderland of consanguinity.

As Terry Hale observes: "Animated portraits became afamiliar stock-in-trade of the Gothic novel throughout the 1790s.Maturin was responsible for the most artistically successful useof the motif in his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). When Melmothburns the painting of his ancestor as demanded by his uncle'swill, 'its undulations gave the portrait the appearance of smiling'as the wrinkled and torn canvas fell to the ground ... this motifwould re-emerge seventy years later in Wilde's Dorian Gray ..."While 'The Family Portraits' in Tales of the Dead bears a markedsimilarity to one of those related by Mathew Gregory Lewis – theauthor of The Monk – when he visited Lord Byron's house partyat the Villa Diodoti in August 1816, and which was jotted downby Percy Shelley in the diary he shared with his sister.

The acknowledged master of the ghost story, however, is stillM R James, English medieval scholar and provost of King'sCollege, Cambridge and Eton. James drew on his ownantiquarian interests to flesh out his protagonists and plots, andredefined the ghost story for the twentieth century byabandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessorsby using more realistic contemporary settings. Thenarrative usually included three main ingredients:

• an atmospheric village, seaside town or country estate; anancient town, abbey or university;

• a rather vague and naive academic as protagonist;

• the discovery of a book or antiquarian object thatsummons up, calls down, or attracts the unwelcomeattention of a supernatural agency, usually from beyondthe grave.

He added this advice for would-be 'ghost' writers: "Anotherrequisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolentor odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well infairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitiousghost story." And: "Two ingredients most valuable in theconcocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and thenicely managed crescendo ... Let us, then, be introduced to theactors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinarybusiness, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with theirsurroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominousthing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently,until it holds the stage."

The scholarly narrative should not for one moment suggestthat James's writing is too bland for the palette of today's horrorgenre. Many of his tales depict scenes and images of savage andoften disturbing violence: for example, in Lost Hearts, adolescentchildren fall victim to a sinister dabbler in the occult who cutstheir hearts from their still-living bodies! He wrote: "Malevolenceand terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthlymalice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distantscreams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed withdeliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering andwallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods ofM G Lewis ['Monk' Lewis]."

In addition to writing his own stories, James championed theworks of Sheridan Le Fanu, whom he viewed as "absolutely inthe first rank as a writer of ghost stories", editing and supplyingintroductions to Madame Crowl's Ghost (1923) and Uncle Silas(1926).

The contemporary 'ghost' story involves the manifestation ofthe 'undead' interacting with the physical world as opposed tothe vampire, who retains a parasitic dependency on its humanvictims. When writing my own horror novel, Whittlewood, the'undead' protagonist was a Celtic shaman who had returned toavenge the defilement of an ancient burial site. He had nophysical form but his magical abilities had been so powerful inlife that he was capable of producing a simulacrum, or 'thoughtform' to do his bidding almost 2000 years after his death.

Haunted houses, however, have provided the contemporaryhorror writer – and the film companies – with licence for themost amazing visual and special effects. The prerequisite forsuccess is an abandoned mansion set in a remote location, withsome disgruntled ghost that vents its psychic spleen on someunsuspecting family, who usually have no responsibility for thereasons behind the disturbances. The most famous novel in thisgenre is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) – finalistfor the National Book Award and considered one of thebest literary ghost stories published during the twentiethcentury, which has been made into two feature films and a play."Jackson relies on terror rather than horror to elicit emotion bythe reader, utilizing complex relationships between the mysteriousevents in the house and the characters' psyches."

By comparison, Hell House (1971) by American novelistRichard Matheson, relies on pure horror and although the novelhas marked similarities to Jackson's, the narrative is shot throughwith much more violence and sexual imagery. Stephen King'sThe Shining (1977) used the setting of a remote, out-of-seasonhotel and established him as the pre-eminent author in thehorror genre. A film based upon the book, directed by StanleyKubrick and starring Jack Nicholson, was released in 1980, andlater adapted into a TV mini-series in 1997.

Another literary element of the 'undead' (and often inconjunction with the haunted house scenario) is the result of along-forgotten curse or psychic infestation that often involvessmall children, often themselves the grisly perpetrators ofunspeakable horror. This device is also employed in historicalhorror fiction since history is littered with ancient curses; or acontemporary story with its roots in the dim and distant past.

Anyone contemplating writing horror stories can gain animmeasurable wealth of knowledge concerning techniques andnarrative style from these acknowledged 'greats' in the genre. Wemay decide to try our hand at short stories in the M R Jamesmould; or we may prefer to embark straightaway on the novel – butwhichever way we decide to go, there are still the preliminariesof learning how to pace the injections of horror into thenarrative to create the best effect on the reader.

Without a doubt, the technique and narrative style of Tales ofthe Dead and In A Glass Darkly do appear extremely dated bytoday's literary standards but as with all aspects of creativewriting, it is always a good idea to have a thorough grounding inthe development of the genre before committing our own wordsto paper – and to be constantly aware that we are still looking tocreate that extreme irrational fear of the utterly unnatural or thesupernatural in our writing.

Ideas and Inspiration

Ghost stories come from all over the globe, so we are notrestricted to home-grown hauntings. We can, in fact, utilisealmost any supernatural presence in any location, providing thatwe've done our homework and can give a fairly credible accountof the antecedents of the ritual, artefact, text, etc., that hasunleashed your 'horror' into the world. In other words, there hasto be someone among the dramatis personae capable of identifyingand dealing with the problem convincingly. Bram Stoker's TheJewel of the Seven Stars is an excellent, classic example. Perhaps weshould also bear in mind M R James's observation that 'ghosts' inhorror stories should be "malevolent or odious" as opposed tothe "amiable and helpful apparitions" of fairy tales is stillapplicable to modern writing.

Exercise

For the first exercise we turn to Krystina Kellingley, publisherof Cosmic Egg, a John Hunt Publishing imprint that specialisesin science fiction, fantasy and horror novels. This extract firstappeared on the Cosmic Egg blog as a guide for potentialhorror writers:

The first thing to do is to think about what kinds of horrornovels you like reading. Having done that the next question isto ask yourself: why? What is it about these particular novelsthat stand out against others that you didn't enjoy quite asmuch?

Now sit down and make a list. Was it the plot? If youanswered yes to this then now is the time to break it downmore fully for yourself. Which elements of the plot had youparticularly gripped? What else made you keep on readingand held your rapt attention? Were the characters believable?Did you care about them and what happened to them? Wasthere lots of tension to keep you turning pages? Perhaps therewas also a burgeoning romance with lots of conflict thrown infor good measure? Was the pacing tight? The dialoguesnappy? Did you, the reader, know something that thecharacters weren't yet aware of? What didn't you like?

Lots of questions here but all equally valid if you want to understandexactly what kind of horror novel you want to write.Analysing the influence of your favourites, may help you toavoid running out of steam half way through, or the mistake ofcross-threading the structure of the plot without realising it. (seeChapter Five: Chimera)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Compass Points Horror upon Horror by Suzanne Ruthven. Copyright © 2013 Suzanne Ruthven. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Compass Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178279266X
• ISBN 13: 9781782792666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90