I have several bloggish/website items on my Big Summer Checklist, so I reckon I should knock off one of them. The past several weeks have been a great stretch for creative fermentation inside my melon, which means my partner has had to put up with me staring at the ceiling and the walls while characters and plot elements take shape. I’ve probably overshot the mark a little bit, since right now much of the mental heavy lifting involves sorting and sifting, trying to decide which imaginative critters belong to which project, but I’m pleased to report that I’m more than ready to tuck in to the vry srs bsns of turning premises into pixels.

I’m feeling especially good feels today because last night the 2022 Stoker Awards were handed out, which means that my media feeds are filled with more love and kindness than I typically come across. I still think of myself as a gawker at the candy-shop window when it comes to the Horror/Dark Fiction community, but on days like these one is bombarded with reminders that Horror Folk are, by and large, among the most sweet-natured and humane creatures one is apt to stumble across. Last night we were all celebrating one another and the year’s achievements, both locally (in Pittsburgh) and virtually, and it’s a real delight, especially as an academic, to see so much affection and admiration in circulation.

My partner and her friends went to the spa as a group yesterday, so there were plenty of good feels and chill vibes to be had at the Abbey. And, perhaps as a result of those ambient vibefeels, I started thinking about how much dark speculative fiction arises from visions of affections misdirected and love gone wrong. The story I’m currently working out involves a bit of small-town logic, in part because smaller towns often serve as fine hothouses for fraught relationships, dark secrets, and longstanding tensions and resentments. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the kids like to say, and there’s often a generational quality to those old grievances and grudges. Stephen King nails that feeling in quite a lot of his fiction, and I tend to look for that microcosmic malaise in lots of movies and stories. The Black Phone, one of last night’s award winners, really makes hay with those dynamics, as we get a little world that feels enclosed and pressurized, ready to boil over even before The Grabber starts plucking kids from the street. Abuse and toxicity are woven into the fabric of the little community the screenwriters depict, an effect that reminds me of Derry in It. To face The Grabber, the protagonist needs to take in–and believe in–a different kind of communal possibility. It’s an especially beautiful movie in that regard, as the ending hints at not just a limited resolution but the potential for something more restorative, more redemptive. It’s powerful coming-of-age stuff, a trajectory that horror handles better than almost any other genre.

Having that thought in my noggin has been a great help in terms of fleshing out characterization. No matter how odd or even pathological the cast of oddballs might be, most readers and viewers are going to go in to the fiction with the belief that people are the way they are for reasons. That’s a hand that writers sometimes overplay (I’m thinking particularly of the recent versions of Halloween right now, in which Michael Myers is thoroughly psychologized, as the viewer bears witness to scads of formative moments that make him something far more understandable–a troubled adult rather than a Big Box of Inexplicable Evil), and it takes plenty of practice to offer the sort of hints and intimations that deepen and complicate the reader’s sympathies without robbing the wickedness that follows, however eerie or gory, of its appalling force.

Every now and again I will dive into a story with only a few bits and pieces of a character in mind, but the story I’m about to embark on has quite a few moving parts meshing together at the level of character from the jump. I won’t commit many background details to the page, but I know these people reasonably well–where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and where they imagine they are going before things get grisly. When I’ve got that much material mapped out, I tend to write far more quickly and far less self-consciously.

Speaking of which, there’s a new bit o’ fiction of mine you can read over at Tales from the Moonlit Path. Hop on hither and see what befalls Janie when a stranger calls.