How Horror Found Me
“Never mind sweet; never mind uplifting; never mind Snow White and the Seven Goddamn Dwarfs. At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.”
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Stephen King is one of the first authors I encountered on my wife’s bookshelves (back when we were just dating) and probably the one I’ve read the most. Despite the evidence, though, I don’t write horror because I want to emulate the King. I didn’t find horror at the end of a long corridor packed with literary genres; in fact, horror found me.
It was a hot, sticky, moist summer night in Torino; one of those nights where all you can do is watch a film and sweat your bed sheets before going to sleep. I was twenty-five years old, and it had been four years since I published my first poetry collection. I had my first novel saved somewhere in my hard drive (fantasy-erotic-autobiographic crap, that was) and I used to say to my fellow engineering students I wanted to be a writer, although I wasn’t writing much.
I was far from my family, far from my girlfriend and most of my friends, and university was as pleasurable as a dentist appointment, when, one day, my sister showed me a digital leaflet about a national horror festival taking place in our hometown, with a literary prize judged by none other that the Italian translator of Stephen King himself.
I couldn’t ignore the call.
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All I had to do was write a short story no longer than 24,000 characters (with spaces) and send it with a €10 payment. Easy, right?
Well; not quite.
Putting together that first story (which will be published on this website on Halloween, obviously translated in English) has been much, much harder than I expected for a few reasons.
1. I wasn’t writing much prose. I said I wanted to; but that was not nearly enough.
2. I hated the entire horror genre. I wouldn’t have been able to watch a horror movie if my life depended on it. Where could I find inspiration? Stephen King, of course, was an exception; but even his short stories are long as novels, so I couldn’t really try to copy him.
3. I had never written a short story before. Only some poetry and a bad, rambling novel.
The deadline was towards the end of July and approaching fast. Cornered into a few days and ignoring a bunch of exams I was supposed to pass, I sat, and I wrote.
I wrote a story about life; about all the things that cannot be changed. I wrote about my fears and I tried to scare myself off writing it. And I did it. I even won a prize for it.
After that first year, I wrote a story and submitted it to the festival without failing for the three following editions, and I always ended up shortlisted or awarded some prize. The last story I’ve sent ended up published in their anthology, and that’s something I’m very proud of.
If you speak Italian, you can get the anthology here.
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Writing horror stories wasn’t really my choice. It was convenient, because the festival was familiar enough to make me feel comfortable while having national coverage; plus, it was a good excuse to go back and spend time with my family. But there was more.
I had never read a book cover to cover before I turned eighteen, and whilst I was writing these stories, I was still developing my taste as a reader. As soon as I read my first book, I knew I wanted to write one of those, but the sheer variety of genres, subjects and themes was paralysing. The only way I could write was if someone chose for me, and that’s why the festival acted like a mentor. It narrowed down my choices to the point of leaving me with one lonely option; write.
In the following three years, I wrote a literary novel—much better than the first one—and I deliberately chose literary fiction because I thought anything else wasn’t worth writing.
Don’t judge me. I was young, reading a lot of Hemingway, and I thought I had the answer to every question in my jeans’ pocket.
I still love that second novel I wrote, but I strongly doubt it will find its place with an Italian publisher.
With time, I wrote more and more and horror would keep knocking at my door. I was fond of the genre now, and I knew it better than any other because I had given myself permission to experiment with it. So, I wrote horrible stuff, for fun, and people found it quite compelling. Especially my wife.
Later in life, when I decided to become serious about this hobby of writing, I realised that horror was giving me an amount of freedom I couldn’t find in other genres.
Within Horror, there’s the hidden opportunity to express what really matters to me with no need of a moral judgement. Horror gave—and still gives—me the chance to explore human behaviour in the most extreme situations, and, at the same time, conceal heavier themes behind suspense and monsters.
I want to talk about discrimination. I want to talk about power imbalances. I want to talk about abuse. I want to talk about sexism and violence, and I want to tell stories. I want to tell horribly captivating tales so that people cannot help but look deep inside themselves and, maybe, get to know the darkest corners of their souls a little better.
Alla prossima.
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