Writers are often misunderstood by their friends and family. It’s a strange thing to create new worlds and fill them with characters of your own design. I often get asked questions like: “Where do your ideas come from?” “Why don’t you write a (insert their favorite genre here) novel? I would totally read that!” Or, my favorite, “Have you written anything I might have heard of?”
With the promotion of All That Waits in the Night, the one currently rising to the top of the list is “Why horror?” I get it. We live in a world where innocent school children are lost to the whim of a madman, where riots in our streets (despite whatever noble cause they were meant to support) left destruction and death in their wake, and where a global pandemic has left us all feeling far less safe even breathing the air than we used to feel. So why write horror when our present reality is dark enough?
Well, to begin with, I seldom pick my subject matter. It picks me. I often confuse my friends when I tell them that the story drives the car. It pulls up to my curb and says, “Hop in, kid!” And I do. I ride along wherever it wants to take me. To NOT get in the car would be disaster. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) Any attempt to ignore the muse is to court sleeplessness and risk becoming haunted by things that can only be exorcised by writing them down. So, when the nightmares that make up All That Waits in the Night first came to me, I had no choice but to commit them to paper.
More importantly, horror is always with us…in our sleeping and, unfortunately, in our waking. Running from it isn’t really a possibility no matter how enticing the notion might be. And there is a difference, I feel, between marinating in the bleak and hopeless dark while stewing in the sorry state of the world, and exploring the darkness for the sake of diagnosing our own weaknesses and stirring within us a longing for the light of hope and faith and virtue.
Do I hope my new book is scary? Of course! Do I want it to inspire hopelessness? Of course not. In fact, I hope that fans of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery–folks raised on Hammer Horror pictures and the like–will enjoy a spooky thrill but, then, come out of the experience with a new appreciation for the good things in life, the kindness at work even in our darkest days, and ultimately for the hope that we’ll all outlast the night and celebrate with great joy the arrival of the morning.
