Wayne Hartshorn on the Resilience of the Horror Short
Out of all the books I own, the ones I've
read the most, the ones I cherish and will never, ever part with, are a stack
of beaten and dusty horror anthologies. Some of the covers are well done,
stylish pieces, professionally illustrated with pictures of werewolves, ghouls
and witches. Sharp graphics that juxtapose against the murky depths of the deep
blacks. Others are cheap and garish things, leering clowns and vibrant blood.
It's quite a collection, there's stories by Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch,
essays on the werewolf trials and a hundred others bits and pieces that I read
when I was a kid in Benalla. That's where I first read most of them, in books I
borrowed from the small catholic school library and later from the larger one
in the town, books I'd read and return, one or two of the stories would stick,
sometimes I thought I'd imagined them when I recalled them, but years later I'd
find a horror anthology in a second hand place, read through, it'd become familiar
and there it'd be, the story of the jilted husband who cast a spell on his
wife's nosey friend, the missing Halloween children, or the one about the fried
man who didn't know when to leave, they kept coming back like echoes.
I've read a few horror novels–for a while that's all I did–some of
them scared me a little, Stephen King's It terrified me, and I'll always enjoy
a monster tale. But a novel has a bunch of characters, plotlines, and back
story, there's so much that can go wrong, it's lightning in a bottle when it
works, but it's difficult. For me as reader, the short story just works better,
they scare me more, and somehow they seem more real. They’re usually based
around one or two people, few monsters if any, no back story, just a slice of horror
up close and personal. They're different from a novel–a novel has to provide all
the details, but shorts are quick glimpses into another world. Unlike a full
novel, the bits before and after the story are almost as important as the story
itself, the story is a snippet of a much larger tragedy, usually one that's
better left to the imagination, one too terrible for words, one that was
happening before we arrived and will continue after we put it down.
This is the kind of horror I like.
This
is why I think horror's natural form is the short story, they're like
anti-jokes, terror yarns, made short to connect quickly with the reader.
I
thought it'd be easy to write but of course it's not, it takes a lot of work
just to get a few pages to fly, but when it does work it catches what I like
about horror better than a novel, after all I've never been terrorized by a
cellar dwelling clown for twenty years, but I have thought, for just a second -
the dead might inhabit my car, or my dad was a werewolf. I like to think that
stuff, just not for a prolonged amount of time, it becomes absurd. It's hard to
not make prolonged horror look absurd. This is where short stories come in to
their own, while they can be outlandish and crazy at times, they hold up, they
feel solid as a Ford truck from the seventies, they’ve stuck with me through
the years.
This is only half the charm though, the other half is the finding of
them, the surprise to find a story I haven’t read in thirty years - and I have
to find them, they don’t sit obvious on the shelves like a novel, with the
title emblazoned across the spine. The short is hidden from view, they’re in
the index, that's if you remember the author's name and the story, which I
usually don't, so they're intrinsically more strange and esoteric creatures
compared to the novel, they’re ethereal in their nature, blown on the wind and
landing almost anywhere, then soaked up as memories, an echo that can sound out
for decades, even centuries, never really finding home anywhere but in the
piles of old anthologies.
So
I’d not be fussed if all the books on my shelf disappeared as long as those
stack there, the dog-eared ones with the strange covers, they don't go
anywhere, they somehow mean more than the rest, they're full of dark
passengers, the supernatural, and fate's worse than death, twenty five to a
volume, that's the good stuff, the rest can go.
It
might be nostalgia, but if that was the case I’d be reading Stephen King and
Judy Bloom over and over, but I don’t, my tastes in novels have moved on, but
my love of the horror short hasn’t changed, they still scare me, they don’t
waste my time, and if they do, who cares, it’s only ten or fifteen pages, the
next one will make up for it.
Wayne Hartshorn lives in Melbourne, Australia. He has written for TrulyDisturbing and has been published in Breach magazine.
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