Poor Nathan, of course, was not informed of his pants’
sordid past. And when the kids see that he is lying helpless in the dust of that basement, they decide to take advantage of the situation and strip this man of his
valuables . . . starting with those expensive-looking
slacks and whatever treasures they may contain. But
after they relieve a protesting, though paralyzed Nathan
of his pants, they do not pursue their pillagery any
further. Not after they see Nathan’s legs, which are the
putrid members of a man many days dead. With the
lower half of Nathan rapidly rotting away, the upper
must also die among the countless shadows of that
condemned building. And mingled with the pain and
madness of his untimely demise, Nathan abhors and
grieves over the thought that, for a while anyway, Miss
McFickel will think he has stood her up on the first date
of what was supposed to be a long line of dates destined
to evolve into a magic and timeless and profound affair
of two hearts. . . .
Incidentally, this story was originally intended for
publication under my perennial pen name, G.K. Riggers,
and entitled: “Romance of a Dead Man.”
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
415
T he S ty les________________________
There is more than one way to write a horror story, so
much one expects to be told at this point. And such a
statement, true or false, is easily demonstrated. In this
section we will examine what may be termed three
primary techniques of terror. They are: the realistic
technique, the traditional Gothic technique, and the
experimental technique. Each serves its user in different
ways and realizes different ends, there’s no question
about that. After a little soul-searching, the prospective
horror writer may awaken to exactly what his ends are
and arrive at the most efficient technique for handling
them. Thus . . .
The realistic technique. Since the cracking dawn of
consciousness, restless tongues have asked: is the world,
and are its people, real? Yes, answers realistic fiction, but
only when it is, and they are, normal. The supernatural,
and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal. Few would argue with these conclusions.
Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is
to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The
question is, can this be done? The answer is, of course
not: one would look silly attempting such a thing.
Consequently the realistic horror writer, wielding the
hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for
merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In
order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must
really know the normal world, and deeply take for
granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and
real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the
supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package
marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. And of the dear reader’s seat. Ultimately, of course, the supernatural
explanation of a given story depends entirely on some
irrational principle which in the real, normal world looks
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as awkward and stupid as a rosy-cheeked farmlad in a
den of reeking degenerates. (Amend this, possibly, to
rosy-cheeked degenerate . . . reeking farmlads.) Nevertheless, the hoax can be pulled off with varying degrees of success, that much is obvious. Just remember to
assure the reader, at certain points in the tale and by way
of certain signals, that it’s now all right to believe the
unbelievable. Here’s how Nathan’s story might be told
using the realistic technique. Fast forward.
Nathan is a normal and real character, sure. Perhaps
not as normal and real as he would like to be, but he does
have his sights set on just this goal. He might even be a
little too intent on it, though without passing beyond the
limits of the normal and the real. His fetish for things
“magic, timeless, and profound” may be somewhat
unusual, but certainly not abnormal, not unreal. (And to
make him a bit more real, one could supply his coat, his
car, and grandfather’s wristwatch with specific brand
names, perhaps autobiographically borrowed from one’s
own closet, garage, and wrist.) The triple epithet which
haunts Nathan’s life— similar to the Latinical slogans on
family coats-of-arms— also haunts the text of the tale
like a song’s refrain, possibly in italics as the submerged
chanting of Nathan’s undermind, possibly not. (Try not
to be too artificial, one recalls this is realism.) Nathan
wants his romance with Loma McFickel, along with
everything else he considers of value in existence, to be
magic, timeless, and the other thing. For, to Nathan,
these are attributes that are really normal and really real
in an existence ever threatening to go abnormal and
unreal on one, anyone, not just him.
Ofcay. Now Loma McFickel represents all the virtues
of normalcy and reality. She could be played up in the
realistic version of the story as much more normal and
real than Nathan. Maybe Nathan is just a little neurotic,
maybe he needs normal and real things too much, I don’t
know. Whatever, Nathan wants to win a normal, real
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
417
love, but he doesn’t. He loses, even before he has a
chance to play. He loses badly. Why? For the answer we
can appeal to a very prominent theme in the story: Luck.
Nathan is just unlucky. He had the misfortune to brush
up against certain outside supernatural forces and they
devastated him body and soul. But how did they devastate him, this is really what a supernatural horror story, even a realistic one, is all about.
Just how, amid all the realism of Nathan’s life, does
the supernatural sneak past Inspectors Normal and Real
standing guard at the gate? Well, sometimes it goes in
disguise. In realistic stories it is often seen impersonating
two inseparable figures of impeccable reputation. I’m
talking about Dr. Cause and Prof. Effect. Imitating the
habits and mannerisms of these two, not to mention
taking advantage of their past record of reliability, the
supernatural can be accepted in the best of places, be
unsuspiciously abandoned on almost any doorstep— not
the bastard child of reality but its legitimized heir. Now
in Nathan’s story the source of the supernatural is
somewhere inside those mysterious trousers. They are
woven of some fabric which Nathan has never seen the
like of; they have no labels to indicate their maker; there
is something indefinably alluring in their make-up.
When Nathan asks the salesman about them, we introduce our first cause: the trousers were made in a foreign land— South America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia
—which fact clarifies many mysteries, while
also making
them even more mysterious. The realistic horror writer
may also allude to well-worn instances of sartorial magic
(enchanted slippers, invisible-making jackets), though
one probably doesn’t want the details of this tale to be
overly explicit. Don’t risk insulting your gentle reader.
At this point the alert student may ask: but even if the
trousers are acknowledged as magic, why do they have
the particular effect they eventually have, causing Nathan to rot away below the waist? To answer this question
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we need to introduce our second cause: the trousers were
worn, for several hours, by a dead man. But these “facts”
explain nothing, right? O f course they don’t. However,
they may seem to explain everything if they are revealed
in the right manner. All one has to do is link up the first
and second causes (there may even be more) within the
scheme of a realistic narrative. For example, Nathan
might find something in the trousers leading him to
deduce that he is not their original owner. Perhaps he
finds a winning lottery ticket of significant, though not
too tempting, amount. (This also fits in nicely with the
theme of luck.) Being a normally honest type of person,
Nathan calls the clothes store, explains the situation, and
they give him the name and phone number of the
gentleman who originally put those pants on his charge
account and, afterward, returned them. Nathan puts in
the phone call and finds out that the pants were returned
not by a man, but by a woman. The very same woman
who explains to Nathan that since her husband has
passed on, rest his soul, she could really use the modest
winnings from that lottery ticket. By now Nathan’s
mind, and the reader’s, is no longer on the lottery ticket
at all, but on the revealed fact that Nathan is the owner
and future wearer of a pair of pants once owned (and
worn? it is interrogatively hinted) by a dead man. After a
momentary bout with superstitious repellance, Nathan
forgets all about the irregular background of his beautiful, almost new trousers. The reader, however, doesn’t forget. And so when almost-real, almost-normal Nathan
loses all hope of achieving full normalcy and reality, the
reader knows why, and in more ways than one.
The realistic technique.
It’s easy. Now try it yourself.
The traditional Gothic technique. Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic man
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
419
ner, I’m almost positive. Perhaps there was even some
little stump of an apeman who witnessed prehistoric
lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a
night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at
the same time to behold this cosmic conflict. Perhaps
such displays provided inspiration for those very first
imaginings that were not bom of the daily life of crude
survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic? I only pose the question, you see. Perhaps the labyrinthine events of triple-volumed shockers passed, in abstract, through the brains
of hairy, waddling things as they moved around in
moon-trimmed shadows during their angular migrations
across lunar landscapes of craggy rock or skeletal wastelands of jagged ice. These ones needed no convincing, for nothing needed to seem real to their little minds as
long as it felt real to their blood. A gullible bunch of
creatures, these. And to this day the fantastic, the unbelievable, remains potent and unchallenged by logic when it walks amid the gloom and grandeur of a Gothic
world. So much goes without saying, really.
Therefore, the advantages of the traditional Gothic
technique, even for the contemporary writer, are two.
One, isolated supernatural incidents don’t look as silly in
a Gothic tale as they do in a realistic one, since the latter
obeys the hard-knocking school of reality while the
former recognizes only the University of Dreams. (Of
course the entire Gothic tale itself may look silly to a
given reader, but this is a matter of temperament, not
technical execution.) Two, a Gothic tale gets under a
reader’s skin and stays there far more insistently than
other kinds of stories. Of course it has to be done right,
whatever you take the words done right to mean. Do they
mean that Nathan has to function within the massive
incarceration of a castle in the mysterious fifteenth
century? No, but he may function within the massive
incarceration of a castlelike skyscraper in the just-as-
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mysterious twentieth. Do they mean that Nathan must
be a brooding Gothic hero and Miss McFickel an
ethereal Gothic heroine? No, but it may mean an extra
dose of obsessiveness in Nathan’s psychology, and Miss
McFickel may seem to him less the ideal of normalcy
and reality than the pure Ideal itself. Contrary to the
realistic story’s allegiance to the normal and the real, the
world of the Gothic tale is fundamentally unreal and
abnormal, harboring essences which are magic, timeless,
and profound in a way the realistic Nathan never
dreamed. So, to rightly do a Gothic tale requires, let’s be
frank, that the author be a bit of a lunatic, at least while
he’s authoring, if not at all times. Hence, the well-known
inflated rhetoric of the Gothic tale can be understood as
more than an inflatable raft on which the imagination
floats at its leisure upon the waves of bombast. It is
actually the sails of the Gothic artist’s soul filling up with
the winds of ecstatic hysteria. And these winds just won’t
blow in a soul whose climate is controlled by central
air-conditioning. So it’s hard to tell someone how to
write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be bom to
the task. Too bad. The most one can do is offer a
pertinent example: a Gothic scene from “Romance of a
Dead Man,” translated from the original Italian of
Geraldo Riggerini. This chapter is entitled “The Last
Death of Nathan.”
Through a partially shattered window, its surface
streaked with a blue film o f dust and age, the diluted glow
o f twilight seeped down onto the basement floor where
Nathan lay without hope o f mobility. In the dark you’re
not anywhere, he had thought as a child at each and every
bedtime; and, in the bluish semiluminescence o f that
stone cellar, Nathan was truly not anywhere. He raised
himself up on one elbow, squinting through tears o f
confusion into the filthy azure dimness. His grotesque
posture resembled the h a lf anesthetized efforts o f a patient who has been left alone for a moment while awaiting
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
421
surgery, anxiously looking around to see i f he’s simply
been forgotten on that frigid operating table. I f only his
legs would mo
ve, i f only that paralyzing pain would
suddenly become cured. Where were those wretched doctors, he asked himself dreamily. Oh, there they were, standing behind the turquoise haze o f the surgery lamps.
" H e’s out o f it, man, ” said one o f them to his colleague.
“We can take everything he’s got on him. ’’ But after they
removed Nathan’s trousers, the operation was abruptly
terminated and the patient abandoned in the blue shadows o f silence. "Jesus, look at his legs, look, ’’ they had screamed. Oh, i f only he could now scream like that,
Nathan thought among all the fatal chaos o f his other
thoughts. I f only he could scream loud enough to be heard
by that girl, by way o f apologizing for his permanent
absence from their magic, timeless, and profound future,
which was in fact as defunct as the two legs that now
seemed to be glowing glaucous with putrefaction before
his eyes. Couldn’t he now emit such a scream, now that
the tingling agony o f his liquifying legs was beginning to
spread upwards throughout his whole body and being? But
no. It was impossible— to scream that loudly— though he
did manage, in no time at all, to scream himself straight
to death.
The traditional Gothic technique.
It’s easy. Now try it yourself.
The experimental technique. Every story, even a true
one, wants to be told in only one single way by its writer,
yes? So, really, there’s no such thing as experimentalism
in its trial-and-error sense. A story is not an experiment,
an experiment is an experiment. True. The “experimental” writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is
very hard to accept, and sometimes too easy. On the one
hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the
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telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the
other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the
telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him.
Either way, literary experimentalism is simply the writer’s imagination, or lack of it, and feeling, or absence of same, thrashing their chains around in the escape-proof
dungeon of the words of the story. One writer is trying to
get the whole breathing world into the two dimensions of
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