What Horror Means To Me
By Stephen Howard
In a way, I’ve been writing horror for longer than I’ve called myself a horror writer. Before I slapped that label on my website header, I’d already published a collection of stories (Condemned To Be). I referred to it as multi-genre, but never horror. That is until an ex-colleague read it and said to me, “I enjoyed it, but it’s very... bleak.” I reassessed those stories and the things I was writing, the ideas I return to, the imagery, and saw the horror at their heart. Since then, I’ve steered into the genre and found it deeply rewarding. Horror is a welcoming genre, increasingly so, and everyone is allowed in. That’s one element I love about it. Another is the history and the scope of it, rich and varied. But I have more personal reasons, too...
Horror is a great place to explore your own fears and try to scratch beneath the surface of those, understand what makes them tick, or simply see those fears play out in an ostensibly safe environment – fiction. A great example from a personal perspective (and an ideal moment to mention an upcoming release!) is my novella, This House Isn’t Haunted But We Are, which will be published by Wild Hunt Books in 2025 as part of their Northern Weird Project. The novella follows a married couple who are grieving the loss of their daughter and take on a renovation project in rural North Yorkshire, only to encounter strange goings on, shifty relatives, and a possible haunting in their new home.
The start point for this novella was simple; I asked myself: what scares me the most? Inevitably, the answer was the loss of a child (what parent wouldn’t place this top of their list?). Having already wanted to write a haunted house story, these things came together and off I went. This story is right up there with those I’ve needed to dig the deepest for, the stories that tap into that deep well we all have inside of us. In the well is a mixture of the things that give us our capacity to create, and chief among them is empathy. It’s empathy that’s at the heart of truly great horror. Yes, you can have a lot of fun with horror, and it can be silly or gross or wild, but, ultimately, the stories that resonate and stick with us are those infused with empathy. It’s why, sometimes, as a writer, if you go to the well too often, it runs dry. It’s why you can feel empty when you finish writing a deeply personal story. But placing yourself in the position of characters undergoing the worst things to ever happen to them, understanding them, holding their hand through dreadful events, requires great empathy. If you lack that quality, it comes off inauthentic, mocking even. It fails.
Unless they’re exceedingly bad characters to whom bad things are due!
Anyway, it’s because of the above that, for me, horror is so important to me. I get to explore subjects that have touched my life, to explore my own capacity for empathy, without the limitations of reality. While the novella I mentioned above is about a hypothetical fear, one I haven’t, thankfully, experienced, I also have an unpublished novella that focuses on the death of a parent. That was written not long after I lost my father to cancer. He was 56. All the anger and disillusionment I felt, well, I poured that right into 25,000 words. One day, I hope it will be published. If not, it was still a deeply cathartic experience, one I couldn’t have had if I weren’t a writer of horror (I’ve often suggested one of the reasons I, and many others, write is as a form of therapy).
And to briefly consider the flipside, consuming horror in various formats can be equally cathartic. It can even make you a better person, increase your ability to empathise, to sympathise, to understand – especially given the rich diversity of modern horror. It’s a broad church, as they say.
So, there you have it. Quite the serious little essay, right? I’ll end on a lighter note; it’s also great fun to see a man’s head explode. Thank you, Mr Cronenberg.
Stephen Howard (he/him) is an English novelist and short story writer from Manchester, now living in Cheshire with his wife, Rachel, and their daughter, Flo. An English Literature and Creative Writing graduate from the Open University, his work has been published by Lost Boys Press, The No Sleep Podcast, Metastellar, and others. He's also published one novel, a comic fantasy titled Beyond Misty Mountain, and the collections Condemned To Be, Little Book of Horrors, & Ophelia in the Underworld and Other Melancholy Tales (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). A horror novella is forthcoming from Wild Hunt Books in 2025. Find Stephen at:
Twitter: @SteJHoward
TikTok: @SteJHoward
Website: www.stephenhowardblog.wordpress.com
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