Tips for Terror: Find the Beauty in the Horrific
Tips for Terror: Find the Beauty in the Horrific
Author Joel McKay borrows wise words from horror writers to illustrate how exposition and lyric bring another dimension to horror
“Describe horrific things beautifully,” author Hailey Piper told our local Horror Writer’s Association chapter several months ago.
The words lodged in my head like a mantra and have since been tattooed to a pink sticky pasted to my monitor for daily reference.
Piper was one of three guests on a panel discussion about all things horror fiction (joined by Eric LaRocca and Gwendolyn Kiste) when she uttered those words.
They were pronounced as a passing thought but immediately became something that resonated deeply with me as a writer.
Describe horrific things beautifully.
That sums it up, doesn’t it?
(Thanks Hailey, Eric, and Gwendolyn – P.S. you’re all awesome. For all you readers out there, get their stuff. Same goes if you’re a writer).
Anyway, the phrase came back to me when I dove into Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart in November, whereupon I quickly discovered that he had a special talent for executing what Piper articulated so well.
Consider this: “The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.
“Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heart, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.” (Barker, 31.)
Here we find an expert weaving narrative the way I believe Piper intended, with such universal beauty and authentic anthropomorphized intent that we can’t help but be taken aback by it, as though we’re surprised as readers to find such gorgeous truth entrenched among the horrific.
After all, this is from a pinhead tale.
Yet the point is, to the uninitiated, horror is too often prejudiced as sadistic, violent yarns not worthy of deeper analysis or debate alongside more traditionally accepted literature.
Now, I am biased but I think Piper would say and Barker shows (Piper does too, for that matter) that’s some bullshit.
Yes, horror scares, causes your skin to crawl, but more importantly—like a good hot sauce—should put you one step to the right of your comfort zone and then invite you to feel comfortable enough, or perhaps excited enough, to go even further, to spice it up … just a little bit more.
So, yes, we often focus on terror, fear, and blood and guts when we talk horror.
That is all good.
But I would argue the net effect of the horrific is amplified when it is couched in beautiful language that draws us into the poetry of the work before hammering us with the gore.
Take Graham Masterton.
His haunted house novel The House of a Hundred Whispers opens with a beautiful paragraph that helps us feel the age of the place, not dissimilar to Shirley Jackson’s classic opening paragraph to The House on Haunted Hill.
“He heard a creak of floorboards behind him and turned around, but there was nobody there, only the dark oil portraits of the Wilmington family that hung around the landing, staring back at him balefully through four hundred years of walnut-coloured varnish.” (Masterton, 1, emphasis added.)
We can feel that age, almost smell it.
And then, yes, someone is hit over the head and tumbles down the stairs.
Nathan Ballingrud does the same in his recent novella Crypt of the Moon Spider.
“Looking through the small oval window of the twin-engine passenger shuttle which carried her over the moon’s gray and rubbled plains, Veronica recalled a local myth, which held that the moon was the inhabited skull of a long-dead god who once trod the dark pathways of space like a king through his star-curtained palace. Looking down upon it now, she could almost believe it. The moon seemed to exude a deathly energy, the way she imagined the bones of a holy animal might. It was no have seemed strange to see a population of ghostly horses galloping across the dusty expanse.” (Ballingrud, 1, emphasis added)
Here the opening of the novella immediately places us in an otherworldly setting—a lunarscape already settled.
Yet the second half of the paragraph wields beautiful language to build myth, a setting and show us how it looks and feels, which is an extraordinarily effective blend of placemaking and poetry that would be effective in any literature but opens the door to a horrific tale about an asylum on the moon.
In all three examples we have classic horror tales—a cosmic slasher, a gothic haunting, and a space art deco body horror—that have used exposition in a near-lyric form that describes horrific things beautifully.
In my own work, I often think about how I can pepper my narrative with beautiful turns of phrase or marrying two words that seldom partner in a sentence to reveal something to the reader in a way that’s new.
I suppose the former journalist is still trying to break news in the sense that I am dodging the contrived, though, admittedly, sometimes a good ol’ hatchet to the head and a scarlet spurt of brain matter does the trick.
No matter how you approach your horror, do have fun with it.
Smell the beautiful in the horrific … and see if you can get your reader to take a big ol’ whiff of that bouquet too.
Sources:
Ballingrud, Nathan. Crypt of the Moon Spider. Tor Nightfire, 2024.
Barker, Clive. The Hellbound Heart. Harper Voyager, 2011.
Masterton, Graham. The House of a Hundred Whispers. Head of Zeus, 2020.