“What Horror Means To Me”
By Arwyn Sherman
When I was still a librarian, I hosted two horror writing workshops at my local library, the first one geared towards teens and the next geared towards adults. One of the exercises was to write down a few things that terrified them, which would then launch into a discussion of how people tend to have common fears and how horror is often a mirror for and a function to process what we, collectively, are scared of.
The teens, who were perhaps more appropriately labeled tweens as none of them were older than fourteen years, listed that they were afraid of bugs, gross things, and monsters. The adults said the ocean and living with no purpose.
The comedy of how, when we grow up, the things we are scared of go from the tangible to the conceptual. A child is scared of a beetle because it doesn’t know what it is. Once they learn that it’s just a bug, their fear becomes existential.
But what does horror mean to me? When asked, what am I scared of? As a child I wrote stories of poltergeists and cats that disappeared forever. As an adult, much like the adults in my workshop, I veered sharply into the wider, perhaps more internal, terrors.
To be completely honest, I didn’t know I was writing horror for years. My stories were macabre, dark and genre-pushing. But I didn’t think they belonged in the horror genre. Surely they weren’t scary enough, they weren’t bloody enough, they weren’t horror. I wrote quiet, disturbing tales of people facing the consequences of a world much larger than they were. The ocean of powerlessness, the dread of meaning nothing. The blip of existence that often extinguishes without a mark. I wrote about things I found overwhelming, ideas that made me short of breath and uncomfortable. Something I could wrestle down into submission through prose, to make it less angst-inducing. On the spectrum of bugs to violent slashers, I am somewhere just a step adjacent to getting lost in the woods and becoming your mother when you grow up.
It was my friends who told me I was writing horror. They sat me down in a groupchat, much like an intervention, and explained my ‘kind of grim’ dark fantasy was, in fact, horror, and I should probably start pitching it as such. But was it really horror? I’ve always consumed horror as a genre, from my wee child self getting absolutely preoccupied with the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark franchise and picking up Stephen King at far too young of age. I didn’t like to be scared, but I did like to be face to face with the grim parts of the world, the darker edges of humanity and nature.
Eventually I realized that fear is more than the adrenaline pounding jump-scare when the derelict ax murderer pops up on the screen. It is that, but it’s also discomfort and disgust, the things that make you exclaim ew and shove whatever it was back into the drawer of the subconscious.
Horror, to me, is the spectrum of all of this irreconcilable ugliness. It’s whatever someone found the need to confront, to pull into the world through a story and translate from vague discomfort to something consumable on a page. Something someone can eat and digest and learn to live through.
You can follow Arwyn Sherman on X @ShermanArwyn to keep up with the latest or at https://www.hopp.bio/arwyn-sherman
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