Why I Conjure Gothic Horrors
Greetings, Darklings:
Today’s post will focus on why I write, or conjure, gothic horrors. I have always loved the shadows, the dark places that maybe others want to overlook or pretend aren’t there. I call those shadows home.
I have always felt like I never fit in. I have always been treated like an outsider. It used to bug me, but I guess I was never meant to fit in. Now I embrace my weirdness. I am glad I didn’t fit in. What does that mean, anyway? In today’s chaotic world, we need more nonconformity than ever. I love horror and the macabre, the dark, shadowy places few would dare to tread.
Being a Witch was a big part of me embracing my weirdness. That may not work for other Witches, but it does for me. It is personal to me. I’ve taken that outsider feeling and created characters in my stories that are outsiders, too, in their own way. Normal is relative, anyway. It is also boring.
Monsters can be, well, monstrous. I created vicious and deadly spider people in my published novella, The Cult of the Spider People. They are terrifying because they act like spiders even though they appear part human. They never think like humans. They crave blood, they are a monstrous size, far more powerful, and it is impossible to reason with them. They exist in darkness, hunt in darkness, and rip you from the light into their darkness, into smelly, moldy cocoons.
Their cave has a massive web where people are trapped in cocoons, praying to be saved, trapped in a world that does not care. That is so Lovecraftian. They speak a different language, they never consider the consequences of their ungodly actions, and they follow the Spider King. They live for the blood. Bones and skulls litter the ground. Sticky spiderwebs snare an unwary human. There is no hope of escape.
Monsters can embody our darkest fears. They can reflect fears back to a person. A monster can be anything, from the tiniest, most harmless spider to a giant squid crushing a submarine in the deep, dark ocean depths. Okay, for me, being trapped in a submarine at the mercy of a giant squid would give me nightmares. How the hell do you escape? How do you escape Arachnall?
By contrast, I wrote a novel that has a monster with a very different story, The Mourning Tide. The novel features a monstrous ghost. The townspeople shun him and act like he doesn’t exist. He is forced to exist with an unbearable loneliness until Rosemary arrives in the town.
She moves into his house. She is grieving the loss of her husband, Henry. She is heartbroken and yearns to be alone to dwell in her own grief. The neighbors are not helpful at all when she asks questions about the ghost Jonathan. Jonathan knows the truth: he was murdered. Rosemary is put to the task of finding the murderer, bringing him to justice, and setting Jonathan free into the light.
He is very human under all that seaweed he bears. He is cursed to carry his grief with him.
So what truly makes a monster? It could depend on what you perceive a monster to be. That can be a strange alien with tentacles or King Kong. If you had never seen a whale before, would you consider it to be a monster? Is an alien like the Greys a monster? Is a monster an embodiment of your fears, like in The Babadook? The Thing? A rattlesnake?
It could be anything that is alien or unfamiliar to you, something so odd and strange you do not know what to think of it. But is there sometimes something more to them, something tragic and human under all those scales or tentacles? Maybe the best monsters are the most sympathetic, such as Frankenstein’s creature. I like to think so.
A monster in your stories should not be just a monster. It can represent something, be symbolic. Show us our deepest, darkest fears when we most want to look away. Some monsters embody a sinister darkness, terrifying and omnipotent, and some are monstrous and yet there is something intrinsically human about them.
Piper is human in the novella The Cult of the Spider People, but at the end of the book, she is a monster—and yet a sympathetic monster.
A thread of hope runs throughout the whole novella, even when Piper is transformed. She is a sympathetic monster because she yearns to be human again, but that is now impossible. She made a huge sacrifice.
To find out more, you can buy the book on Amazon when it is released again in October, at the beginning of the month. I also have signed copies available. I can help pay for shipping if anyone wants a signed copy! The new edition will be released in October. That’s only a few months away!
A thread of hope runs through The Mourning Tide, my other horror story that will also be released in October. Yes, I have the wonderful fortune of having two of my horror novels released in October. One more reason to love Samhain!
The publisher is home from the hospital, but she has to rest. The publishing schedules were shifted. Nothing could happen until the publisher was home from the hospital. She has to rest. I wish her the best, and I hope you can all wish her the very best, too!
The thread of hope in The Mourning Tide is that we root for Rosemary and hope she succeeds in her quest to help Jonathan cross over into the light, finally finding peace.
Here we have two stories, with hope and monsters and heart.
I am now working on a new horror novel. I will enjoy discovering the voices of the characters, the theme, the plot, the setting, and, of course, the monsters, be they human or horned!
Blessed Be, Spiderwitch
#monsters #humanity #ghosts #gothic #horror #hope #shadows #fear #light #darkness
