Horror and the Fifteen-Year-Old Girl
- Peter Molnar
- Sep 21, 2015
- 3 min read
Horror-fiction is in desperate need of a "Renaissance", a "rebirth". I know...a pretty bold statement to make as the first sentence of my very first blog post. I don't say this to be provocative, but to start off on the right foot, so to speak. This is a theme that will be interwoven through all of my posts from here on out. Horror fiction is beyond sacred to me and has been ever since I picked up my father's tattered copy of "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King at 10 years-old and caught the fever not only to write, but the compulsive drive to terrify as effectively as that book terrified me. I have been writing horror fiction ever since. Through the years, I came to think that I had finally figured out how to tap into my own fears, to tap into the "plausible threat", I guess, and to park that threat in my reader's living room. On their doorstep. Under their bed. Then, my 15 year-old daughter snapped me out of that delusion! She read "Salem's Lot", another King masterpiece, for her high-school summer reading. I truly envied my daughter her first reading of this novel and I was so excited to hear how much the book terrified her. Yeah...that's not what happened at all! "It's not scary at all, Dad," she told me, two-hundred pages in. I asked her what movies scared her and she was pretty hard-pressed to think of an answer. "Found-footage" horror movies like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" freak her out. She grew up reading R.L. Stine, but he was "more fun to read than scary". Finally, she confessed, "Books don't scare me at all." And there it was...my wake-up call! It was like my previous understanding of what scares people had been turned in on itself. Here's why this matters: I firmly believe that if you can truly frighten a teenager, someone spring-loaded with sarcasm and cynicism and a completely irrational sense of immortality, then you can scare ANYONE! Suddenly, I was writing stories and editing my novel with my daughter's words set firmly at the forefront of my mind. In asking my daughter about what scared her and what she thought about "Salem's Lot", I had unknowingly taken the temperature of modern horror fiction. And I learned how ill the form had become. I became obsessed with figuring out how to heal the form I hold so sacred. I overhauled all of my projects, one-by-one. And after a lot of hand-wringing and serious soul-searching, during which I really plumbed the depths for what I believe is absolutely frightening about the world today, I found that my writing hit a darker patch and turned more viscerally terrifying than ever before. So, I repeat, horror fiction needs a "rebirth". But there are great and horrifying examples of the form thriving in bookstores today, if you know where to find them. Check out "Handling the Undead" by Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, the most frightening novel I have read since "Pet Sematary". Check out Jonathan Maberry's 'Ghost Road Blues" trilogy, for downhome horror. Check out Dan Simmon's "Drood", where historical fiction meets the fresh grave. Of course, read your King, Straub, and your Barker and call me in the morning! Who else? I want to hear from you.
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