How Not to Mess Up Your Horror Novel
Horror sometimes gets a bad rap in literary circles. It’s considered by book snobs as above only romance and erotica, and sometimes below romance. They give a lot of reasons for that, things like:
- It appeals to base instincts
- It applies a juvenile perception to the world
- It relies on tricks and puerile gore to impact readers
- It focuses on the worst part of humanity and the human condition
- It relies on characters making dumb decisions
But horror is filled with good characters, high stakes, deep drama, true love, tense action, and evocative settings. At its best, it stands side-by-side with the highest literature. If nobody messes it up, it’s still a whole lot of fun.
The trick is not to mess it up..but there’s good news. Horror writers are some of the friendliest authors in the business, and among the first and most enthusiastic when it comes to sharing what they’ve learned in their own writing journey.
Most agree that these are the ten top rules to avoid making the mistakes that make some treat horror as a guilty pleasure.
Top Ten Tips for Bringing the Best Out of Your Horror Novel
1. Be Miserly With Information
If you’ve ever been camping, you know that the shadows in the trees are much scarier before you shine a flashlight there – even if the flashlight reveals something a little frightening. Imagination is vital to horror. If you tell your reader everything, they have nothing to anticipate or to blow up bigger than it actually is.
Aim to give just enough mental rope for your reader to hang their own fear with, and stop there. A mystery fully explained doesn’t haunt anybody for years afterward.
2. Don’t Be Lazy With the Stakes
I mean this in two ways. First, the stakes of a horror novel must be meaningful. If your protagonist has stage four cancer and a week to live, then it will take more than the threat of their own death to really be frightening. Without something important to lose, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Second, get creative with your stakes. Death is just the beginning, but what else can the horror threaten? What fate worse than death could you explore? This is why love subplots are so common in all genres, but you can get deeper, darker, and more frightening than that.
3. Find All The Monsters
At its core, horror is just like any other genre. It relies on conflict to be a story. An easy mistake is to make the conflict solely with the “monster” — the psycho killer, alien menace, restless ghost, or whatever else is at the heart of your terror. That conflict has to exist, but it’s only the beginning.
What monsters hide in the hearts of your characters? In the setting they struggle in? In society itself? These terrifying beasts are what turns a simple scarefest into something truly compelling…if you have the courage to find the monsters within yourself.
4. Sprinkle in Different Kinds of Horror
If you look up “kinds of horror”, you’ll find a list with dozens of entries, but horror master Stephen King breaks them into just three basic categories:
- The Gross-Out, which revolts the audience with the sight of something horrible. Jump scares and cat scares fall in here too, aiming for an adrenal startle response rather than the revulsion of seeing something gross.
- Horror, which shows the reader something unbelievable and scary. This is when the monster is revealed, or the serial killer locks the basement door, or the first zombie rises from the ground. It confronts characters and readers with a dangerous problem to solve.
- Terror, which implies the horror, but doesn’t spell it out. As I mentioned earlier, readers will usually imagine something much worse than we’re willing to write down.
Engaging all three types of horror at different points in your story scares readers on different levels.
5. Steal Resources, Then Steal More.
It’s been said the difference between a horror story and an action story is how many bullets the protagonists get. Horror comes when characters are faced with a threat that’s beyond their resources to overcome. A bear hunt changes when you run out of ammunition. An alien invasion becomes terrifying when they can turn invisible at will.
One of the most effective ways to amp up the tension in a horror story is to remove additional resources as the story progresses. This might happen as friends and allies die, as communications fail — and yes, as ammunition is expended. Take away what they relied on and counted on having, and the risks and fear soar.
6. Watch Your Pacing
If you build up too slowly, you’ll lose reader engagement before you get to the good parts. If you start too strong and maintain that pace throughout, you’ll lose readers through sheer exhaustion. A good horror story ebbs and flows like a tide.
The exact rhythm of that tide is up to you, but what usually works best is a series of highs and lows, with the waves coming at increasing speeds until you reach your nail biting, unrelenting climax and conclusion.
7. Write Smart Characters
Few things ruin a horror story like having characters end up endangered because they made stupid decisions. The days of teenagers splitting up to sleep in separate bedrooms, unarmed, with the women in nighties, with a serial killer loose in their town, are gone. Audiences expect more of their protagonists, and we need to give it to them.
The best horror stories happen when smart people make smart decisions…and still end up in serious trouble. Your readers will thank you when the characters have to dig deep into competence and intelligence to escape with their lives.
8. Use Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is powerful in horror because it can heighten contrast, shock the readers, and subvert expectations. By showing the normal against the eerie, the large against the small, the powerful against the weak, even the tidy against the chaotic, you increase the power of what is unexpected or unfamiliar.
9. Never Underestimate Your Audience
Just like with your characters, never rely on an audience being dumb to make your story work. Gaping plot holes, clues that are too easy to spot and put together, and simple errors in how the world really works will break immersion and lose you readers.
Readers tend to be smart. Horror readers tend to be especially smart about horror. Write stories that will surprise and confound them despite their intelligence and familiarity with the genre. If you can surprise somebody who’s been reading horror for decades, you will have done your job.
10. Choose a Limit to Push
Horror, like comedy, derives much of its power from transgression. Therefore, a great horror story pushes to and through at least one limit. That limit might be a social convention, a staple of the genre, an emotional boundary, or any of a hundred other things. But if you don’t intentionally push a limit, your fiction will fall flat.
Better yet, find a limit within yourself to push while you’re writing it. If you can make yourself uncomfortable, imagine how impactful it will be on the readers.
What’s Your Crossover?
Horror is an interesting genre because it’s really only half of the story. If you write a slasher novel set in a Victorian mansion, a 1980s summer camp, or a spaceship in the 30th century, they all get put on the same shelf of the library.That gives writers of horror more space to play than writers in many other genres.
It also gives you power. By embracing the strengths and best practices of the other half of your genre, you will make your horror story scarier, more compelling, and generally better and brighter than if you hadn’t.
