And before I say anything else: I’m nobody.  Have very little to give credence to what I’m about to say.  Very lukewarm to modest publishing credits, a love of  horror, genre, and weird fiction, and an all-consuming desire to read.  That’s it, and this series isn’t an expression of my superiority or expertise, but a sharing of discoveries along my own path, as I’ve discovered them.

Given that, I feel the following is an important topic, for any horror writer interested in submitting to future editions of The Midnight Diner, and for young horror writers in general.

And that’s the overwhelming importance for horror writers to actually read a broad sampling of horror at some point in their career.  It’s something that has become, for some reason, a lot more important to me lately.  We’ve heard and read often the opinion of established and rising authors alike that it’s important to read outside your chosen genre, and this is very true.  I’ve stated often enough how grateful I am for a job – teaching high school English – that exposes me to a wide variety of the classics every year.  Because good storytelling is just good storytelling, after all.

But I’ve become convinced that someone calling themselves a horror writer should not only be immersed in the history of the genre, but also be aware of trending works.  Young horror writers should all be reading in their genre, in it’s past and present.

And I’m not exactly sure who I’m blogging this to, really.  Maybe me.  Maybe the former me, maybe to young horror writers just starting out in the genre who are like that former me.  I called myself a “horror” writer, because I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz (still do!). When I felt really daring, I read Peter Straub, and on occasion, John Saul. But that was it.  My knowledge of the horror genre was so very shallow, which affected the kind of horror I tried to write.   Worse, I think maybe I’d seen more horror movies than I had read horror novels & short stories, and it showed.

I remember the first story I submitted (not sold) to the first edition of The Midnight Diner.  It was bad, folks.  Combined all the worst elements of the Blade movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, every vampire/vampire-hunter movie I’d ever seen, and some comic books I’d read.  And it got rejected. No, check that: it got trashed.  As it should’ve been.  But apparently the editor thought maybe some promise existed there, so he invited me to submit again.

So, I decided it was time to write a kind of horror story I’d never tried before.  I noticed the Diner had a Cthulhu category, so, for the first time, I read up on a category of horror I had previously known only a little about.

And, wow.

I may’ve discovered Lovecraft and Cthulhu late in life, but it made a difference.  Just reading several of those short stories, researching the mythos nudged my ideas into new, different directions.  Out of that, I produced the first story I ever sold – “The Way Station” – which netted me decent money, also an Editor’s Choice Award.

So maybe I’m writing this blog to a young writer now – maybe someone thinking of submitting to future editions of the Diner – who has been writing the same zombie or vampire or werewolf story, over and over. Or, (as I eventually found out), rewriting that same Lovecraftian/Elder Gods/Ancient Ones story over and over.  Maybe I’m saying to them: “Read more horror. New horror. Old horror. Weird fiction.  Folktales, myths. Mix it up. Diversify, and push your ideas in new directions.”

Another important reason to read a lot of horror – all forms, past and present – is to weed out ideas that may be overworked, and at least confront us with the reality these stories have been done before, and need to be retooled in new ways.  For this, I reference Brian Keene’s keynote address for AnthoCon 2011, “Roots:”

A horror writer should know the genre’s history for several reasons. First and foremost, they should know it so as not to repeat the mistakes of its past. They should draw upon that history, letting the books and stories that have been written in the past inspire and inform and shape their own work. You know that novel you’re working on about Nazi ghosts haunting a tank? Graham Masterton beat you to it back in the Seventies. If you’re writing about vampires, you’ve probably read Dracula — but did you also read the works of Les Daniels, or Salem’s Lot, They Thirst, Vampyrrhic, or Lot Lizards? Maybe you saw Ramsey Campbell at a convention and were told he is one of the most important living authors, but you’re not sure why. This is unacceptable. Maybe (and most importantly) you want to become a better writer by studying and understanding the various styles of writers that came before you. The only way to do that is through reading.

You need to read fiction that has inspired and informed and shaped the genre into what it is today. Like those 28 Days Later-style zombies? I bet you’ll love Jim Starlin’s Among Madmen or Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy. Perhaps you enjoy the exploits of occult detectives such as F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, or my own Levi Stoltzfus. But have you read Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John the Balladeer stories or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder? Like John Carpenter’s The Thing? Yeah? But have you read John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?

When I heard Brian give this speech at AnthoCon last year, I thought: “Geez. It’s like he’s talking to me, four years ago.”  So maybe that’s who I’m talking to, now.

Another reason why I believe it’s important to read lots of different kinds of horror is that its tradition, its history is one of the things that makes the horror genre special.  This is something I knew instinctively, but honestly hadn’t really thought about much before this past year.

My recent quest to build my knowledge of the horror genre and its history certainly brought these thoughts to the forefront, but it was some recent nonfiction reading – Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror – that crystallized my thoughts in the following passages.  First, he calls horror a “post-modern art”, because post-modern artists:

“…whether for purposes of political criticism or for nostalgia, postmodern art lives off its inheritance….it proceeds by recombining acknowledged elements of the past in a way that suggests that the root of creativity is to be found in looking backward (emphasis mine)” pg. 211

“…the contemporary horror genre….differs from previous cycles (of horror) in certain respects that also bear comparison with the themes of postmodernism.  First, works of contemporary horror often refer to the history of the genre quite explicitly.   King’s IT reanimates a gallery of classic monsters; the movie Creepshow by King and Romero is a homage to EC horror comics of the fifties; horror movies nowadays frequently make allusions to other horror films while Fright Night (the original, thanks) includes a fictional horror show host as a character; horror writers freely refer to other writers and to other examples of the genre; they especially make reference to classic horror movies and characters.” (pg. 211)

“…the creators and the consumers of horror fictions are aware they are operating within  a shared tradition, and this is acknowledged openly, with great frequency and gusto (emphasis mine) pg. 211

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad (of horror), and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

Whispers was probably the most widely respected and one of the most ambitious of the new horror and fantasy fiction magazines of the 1970s. It became at least as visible and nearly as influential as a series of mostly original anthologies in the 1980s.

Named after a fictitious magazine referenced in the H. P. Lovecraft story “The Unnameable”, Whispers began as a modest attempt by editor and publisher Stuart David Schiff to produce a modest semi-professional little magazine that hoped to revive the legendary Weird Tales in a small way. It went on to be an ever more elaborate and well-produced showcase for much of the best dark fantasy fiction and artwork of the 1970s.

Among the fiction writers featured in the magazine were Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner. David Drake published much of his early fantasy fiction there. Among the artists to contribute were Stephen Fabian, Lee Brown Coye, Vincent Napoli, and many others, both legends in their own right and younger stars. The magazine won the first “Howard” or World Fantasy Award for non-professional publishing in 1975, though it was clearly on a professional level in editorial content and production.

Beginning in 1978, an anthology series, drawing on some of the best work published in the magazine and mixing some new material, was published in hardcover by Doubleday and then in paperback by Playboy Press, soon after absorbed by Berkley/Putnam, which began a trend of parallel publication of increasingly infrequent issues of the magazine and a string of anthologies with an ever larger proportion of original fiction. A total of six anthologies were published through 1987, and later a “Best of” volume was published in 1994.

Schiff also launched a book-publishing arm, Whispers Press, in the latter 1970s, which produced elegant and well-illustrated volumes. After a sampling from Whispers was published in the Gahan Wilson-edited First World Fantasy Awards volume, Schiff and Fritz Leiber co-edited the Second World Fantasy Awards volume for Doubleday.

(from Wikipedia)

I discovered Whispers from the source himself: the editor, Stuart David Schiff who, wonder of wonders, lives in my area.  In short: bestselling authors and genre veterans Tom Monteleone and F. Paul Wilson were visiting and conducting workshops with my Creative Writing students at my school.  One night, they invited me to come hang out with them and “their friend Stu”.  That night was unlike any other I’ve experienced since, hanging out with the greats of the genre.  I wax overly philosophical about my evening here.  Suffice  to say, only days later, I was tracking down the Whispers anthologies all over the ‘Net.

And, like Charles Grant and T. M. Wright, these collections proved to be eye-opening in the extreme.  Because here’s the thing: this is an unsubstantiated, off-the-cuff opinion, but it seems very much that with the exception of Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, and “Year’s Best” horror anthologies, the only other quality horror anthology (yes, I’m cutting out many  small press anthologies in that statement)  consisting of simply horror stories is the Horror Library, published by Cutting Block Press and edited by R. J. Cavender (and this blog series is very much about exploration, so if anyone knows of current quality genre anthologies I’m skipping, please feel free to comment!).

The rest today all seem to be themed anthologies.  And while reading one or two of those is fun, the stories in Whispers just about SHAMED THEM ALL.  Because they were simply fantastic stories.  Of all kinds.  Varied, diverse…and damn good.

I’ve read Whispers 1, Whispers 2, Whispers 3, Whispers 4 and Whispers 6.  And I found that, by and large, those stories far outpace most current short fiction.  In the Whispers series I discovered the likes of Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, Dennis Etchison, David Drake, Fritz Leiber,  Russell Kirk, Manley Wade Wellman, Alan Ryan, Steve Ransic Tem, Tanith Lee and encountered many of the folks I’d just been discovering at that time: Charles Grant, J. N. Williamson and others.

And again – maybe I’m reading all the wrong current anthologies – but what seems to make Whispers special is their simplicity: these are simply collections of great stories, selected by an editor who KNEW good fiction.  A themed collection is nice to read now and then, but every single story working off a similar theme gets old after awhile, and it seems like today’s market is absolutely choked with them.  Whispers, for me, provided a much needed breath of fresh air: simply a collection of astounding stories.

Sadly, all these volumes are out of print. I found my mine pretty handily on secondary markets like Amazon and BN.com and used book stores, however, for good prices.  Hopefully, these will someday be republished in ebook form for a new generation.  Until then – if you’re serious about writing good genre short fiction,  and serious about submitting good genre fiction to future editions of The Midnight Diner, especially…hunt up some of these bad boys, pronto.

In any case, we move on to the very next author I “discovered” late in the game, Charles L. Grant. Below, a biography:

Charles Lewis Grant (September 12, 1942 – September 15, 2006) was a novelist and short story writer specializing in what he called “dark fantasy” and “quiet horror.” He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, and Deborah Lewis.

 Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story “A Crowd of Shadows”, and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella “A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye,” the latter telling of an actor’s dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award-winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Al Sarrantonio, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association. His story “Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street” was adapted into an episode of Tales from the Darkside entitled “The Milkman Cometh” in 1987.

Grant wrote 12 books (9 novels and three collections of four related novellas with interstitial material) set in the fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. (See the starred titles below.) Three of these were intentionally pastiches of classic Universal and Hammer horror films, and feature a vampire, a werewolf, and an animated mummy. There is a loose continuity running through the Oxrun Station books, with characters from one novel making minor appearances in others. (Wikipedia)

First of all – what can I say? Hard to condense everything into a simple blog entry. I know this: I wish I’d met the man. From what everyone has told me, he was kind, generous, thoughtful, helpful, a consummate professional. All I can do is share what his writing has come to mean to me.

The first novel of his I read was The Black Carousel. Ironically, his last Oxrun Station work. Instantly, I fell in love with his prose. It had Bradbury’s sensibilities…but leaner. More subtle. Much tighter. But still capable of a faint lyricism near to poetry. And hey, it was about a dark, possibly malevolent carnival coming to a small, country town. As a Bradbury lover and annual devotee to Something Wicked This Way Comes, I was hooked.

And there’s this mood in Charles’ work. Melancholic. Wistful. Sad, but never really cynical. And, believe it or not, I can be a pretty melancholic guy. Also, between reading T. M. Wright and Charles Grant, I felt like – as a writer hopeful – that I’d come home. That this was something concretely in the horror genre that I felt the desire to write.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I encountered these writers as I was writing/finishing Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, and that certainly wasn’t “quiet horror”. And, writing Hiram was fun. Definitely dark adventure fantasy, something I’d want to return to. However, I recognized something in Charles’ work that I wanted to see in my own work someday.

But even then, I don’t think I got the brilliance of Oxrun Station.  That was coming, however.

I moved on from The Black Carousel to For Fear of the Night and Stunts.  Now, I loved both of these works as well… though Stunts is one of my least favorite of his – if you can even call it that – only because it felt like a strange novel.  Two completely different stories jammed together.  But what was really starting to make me fall in love with Grant’s work was  this: the stories centered on the human experience.

There were “monsters”, sure. But not necessarily monsters you could beat. And this is probably where the categorization of “dark fantasy” comes in, because Charles’ work deals primarily in the frailty and fragility of humanity in the face of forces it cannot comprehend, much less fight.  But he wasn’t Lovecraftian, by any means.  These characters were so well portrayed, so deeply drawn. And so wonderfully flawed.  In many of Charles’ stories, the existence of these supernatural, paranormal forces are simply a given.  But they aren’t monsters to be bested and destroyed by the end of the novel.

They were testing agents.  These novels were proving grounds for humanity.

And lots of times, the humans just weren’t strong enough to win the day.  But Charles’ work has never felt hopeless or nihilistic to me.  And trust me, I’ve read lots of that stuff.  They were melancholic.  Sad.  Maybe even gloomy.  But there was hope in there.  Maybe the “laughing in the dark” kind of hope…but isn’t that the kind of hope we have to rely on, so often?

After that, I discovered another series that landed me solidly in Grant’s corner, even before I become enthralled with Oxrun Station, and that was his Millennium Quartet series – basically, his story of the world’s end.  The first book in that series was Symphony, which introduced me to one of my favorite characters, Reverend Casey.    A humble man, a reformed hoodlum-turned preacher.  Who finds himself tasked with facing down what are essentially the four horseman of the Apocalypse.

Now, THIS is an “end times” book I can get down with.  Because it was about the people.  About their strengths and weaknesses, and Casey’s own disbelief that God could use someone like him. And, of all his novels at that point, it featured the “happiest” ending of them all, with perhaps the exception of In A Dark Dream – which definitely is one my favorite Grant portrayals of family. I’ve also read the second book in the series, In The Mood, and am looking forward to finish the series.

And now – Oxrun Station.  12 works in total, all set in the same town. Three novels, wonderful pastiches of the classic horror tropes of vampires, werewolves and mummies.  Five novels and four 4-novella collections…all connected.  All about a mysterious town where strange things happen. People go missing.  Disappear.  “Leave town”.  Some people survive their dark adventures, but then are so scarred, they never share their stories.

It’s nearly impossible to put into words how wonderful the Oxrun series is.  The strongest of them, by far, are the collections of novellas, if only because they’re framed by a first person narrator – a writer living in Oxrun who very easily could be Charles himself, from my reading.  And, as true to the rest of the stories: we never exactly find out what is wrong with Oxrun Station.  These mysteries are never really solved.  But it’s sorta – in my guess – not about that, really.

It’s about the people. About their nightmares and fears, about their frailties. And about those who survive, who – in a quote from The Black Carousel – are “holding on”.  A year ago last Spring, on vacation, I purchased all the novella collections, and read them in one week.  And was left breathless, thinking I’d discovered the greatest thing ever.

I think his best two novels, however, are works very different from the ones I’ve outlined above.  They are The Nestling and Raven.  The Nestling is simply a great, more traditional quiet horror/thriller about an Indian curse that’s killing people in a small Midwestern town, in a conflict between the Americans and the modern Native Americans living over land rights.   It’s still got Grant’s signature style – things rustle behind you quietly…

…whispersoft….

…but it’s an excellent commercial thriller. And his treatment of the Indians in this is top notch.  You’d think he wrote about them all the time.

Then comes The Raven, one of the most brilliantly-paced thrillers I’ve ever read.  Again: excellent, razor-sharp character studies, and the story deals with the most inevitable force in the universe: Death.

And there are no chapters.  In the whole novel.  Because the story takes place all in one night.  His pacing here is masterful. I think I may’ve read this all in one day.

What else can I say? Not much that would even come close, and this blog is already too long.  One thing I can do is this: NECON EBOOKS and Crossroads Press is working to bring all of Charles’ Grant’s work back into print.  You can already purchase several of the titles in ebook form here for NECON and here for Crossroads Press.  If you’re a serious horror writer or reader that’s look for a little more substance in your reading diet, please – explore Charles Grant’s work.  Soon.

*Photo by Peter Coleborn.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine, and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he’s currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

And, a clarification: In choosing to title this “Modest History of Horror“, I really mean a modest account of MY explorations into its history.  Basically, a chronicling of my attempts to move past my very narrow diet of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub (a good diet, to be sure. But still a narrow one).  So, once a week, I’ll feature writers as I’ve discovered them.  Many of them craftsmen, some of them good at telling stories.  And all writers I’ve been so happy to discover, I’ve had a hard time reading new horror.

For my first post, I’ll look at the first new horror writer I “discovered”, T. M. Wright.  A brief bio below:

T.M. WRIGHT is in his 43rd year as a writer. Author of twenty-three novels (in and out of print) in various languages, a few short stories (he finds the novel easier to write), and lots of poetry, Wright is convinced that the quest for exactly the right word or phrase can hobble any writer. A father, grandfather, woodworker, and artist, Wright loves Boston terriers, Maine coon cats, and vegetarian cuisine.

According to Ramsey Campbell, TM Wright is a “one-man definition of the term ‘quiet horror.” Since 1978, he’s published 22 novels in fourteen languages, some of which have become classics in the field of horror and dark fantasy. Former literary editor of Writer Online, and now in charge of generating contests, some reviewers have called him “the best ghost story writer alive.”

T. M. Wright was officially the first quiet horror author I ever encountered.  Not long after, I read Invisible Fences by Norman Prentiss, (whom you all should read, also) and because I really liked his writing and someone compared him to Charles Grant, I eventually sought out – THANK GOD – the work of the late Charles L. Grant.  But it was T. M. Wright I picked up first, and his novel The Place.

The thing that struck me most about The Place was how human the story was.  It possessed genre trappings, to be sure.  But what captivated me was the human experience at its core.  At the time, I’d started reviewing horror full time for Shroud Magazine.   Was getting lots of Leisure Fiction titles, especially (back BEFORE they tanked).

With the exception of a few authors (Robert Dunbar, Gary Braunbeck, Nate Kenyon, Mary Sangiovanni, Ron Malfi), most of the writing didn’t seem to have much substance.  So I wasn’t sure that “horror author” was a title fit for me. So many of those stories revolved around demons, serial killers, serial killers who liked to have graphic sex in the middle of their victims’ remains, killer clowns (yes), and women raping monsters – and endless variations on those  themes. The genre trappings seemed the center of those stories, not the human experience.

But The Place stood in stark and thankful contrast.  Greta is a special needs child – probably with Aspberger’s, though it’s never named – trying to understand a world she doesn’t quite fit in to.  She has a “place” she goes to, a place that’s made real through her thoughts.  There’s a somewhat weak father who knows he’s weak and hates it, and a mother desperate to save her son.  And yeah, there’s a psycho killer in this novel, also…but the story didn’t exist to glorify his exploits.

Also, The Place was subtly written.  Building its suspense very slowly.  And – even though I’d rather have a character swear naturally than be unnaturally written – The Place was written with restraint.  With respect to the reader, if that makes any sense.   And it was finely written. With a sense of rhythm and balance I often find lacking in most contemporary horror fiction.

It was the very first time I thought to myself: Hey. I think this is the type of stuff I’d like to write.

The next T. M. Wright novel I read was The Island.  About a winter resort lodge in the Adirondacks, read, appropriately enough, on one of the biggest snow days we had last year, when we got blasted.  Everything covered with snow, iced over, which only made reading The Island that much more powerful.  In any case, like The Place, The Island was more about a grouping of humans and their insecurities, petty jealousies, hopes, dreams, and nightmares.  And yeah, there’s these… things…out there, under the ice, just waiting.  For the right moment. But it was the people that mattered, which generated the fear and tension – because  we really didn’t want anything bad to happen to these folks.

Now this novel worked on me even more than The Place.  Wright ratcheted up the tension and managed to carry it through the whole novel, to the point where EVERYTHING became fodder for shivers.  And you honestly felt so much for many of the characters.  His characterization, spot on.  Very acute.  And, like The Island, the prose flowed in a smooth, unobtrusive way that just makes me envious beyond all reason.

One thing that also struck me early on about T. M. Wright and other quiet horror authors – and this is just my opinion and observation, I’m no authority – is that they seem to view the resolution of their stories differently than a lot of mainstream horror.   Let’s see if I can articulate what I mean:

We all want happy endings.  We want to see the monster beaten, the good guys win, see someone survive.  And, in my own way, I think that’s very important. If we’re going to show the dark aspects of the human experience, we should show the light, also.   And sometimes happy endings or at least positive endings come naturally.  But sometimes they can be forced.  Because a happy or positive ending doesn’t necessarily resolve the conflict developed by the plot.  Just from my short reading this last year and a half, it seems a lot of quiet horror authors resolve the conflicts…but their resolutions DON’T necessarily make everything happy.

Anyway, on to A Manhattan Ghost Story.  Probably one of the most surreal, psychologically disturbing ghost stories I’ve ever read, because it seems lots of horror novels paint ghosts as either one or two ways (and I’m totally generalizing, here): menacing and evil, or disembodied spirits pleading to be “put to rest”, so they can have peace.

The ghosts in A Manhattan Ghost Story exist in their own layer of reality that overlaps ours, a listless, stumbling existence that could very well be described as hell on earth.  There’s no peace for these ghosts – at least, not that anyone knows – but they also have no agenda. No vengeance to carry out.  They simply are.  With no purpose or direction.  That’s what makes them so frightening, existentially speaking. And Wright’s most unsettling treatment of ghosts in this is that they don’t haunt empty houses or crypts or grave sites.  They exist, in a way, alongside us.  As that strange person on the subway who doesn’t look quite “right”.  People who don’t fit in with their surroundings, or behave in slightly odd ways.

And they still suffer. Not necessarily physical pain,  but a deep spiritual pain, from their sense of loss and dislocation. They belong nowhere, and they know it.

My final T. M. Wright (I’ve got many more on my shelf), is Little Boy Lost, recently reprinted by Uninvited Books.  Again, another story in which the horror lies in loss. Not only loss in the disappearance of Miles Gales’ son, but his loss of self, his inability to save not only one son, but protect the other.  The loss of his first wife, and the “loss” of his second wife to the horror that she becomes.

Also, Little Boy Lost is structurally superior to most of the horror novels I’ve read.  Not to be snide, but when I’m checking out a horror novel – especially from the last ten or twenty years – and I see a reviewer bash it with something like this:

this was the stupidiest novel it made no sense OMG  it jumped all over the place and he repeats himself, this guy can’t write worth sh-t *

…then I know most likely the author tried something on a structural level just a BIT too complex for that reader’s poor little brain to grasp, and that I’ll probably like it, myself.  And this was the case with Little Boy Lost. Non-linear, with several different threads moving through the past, present, and future…and if you just PAID ATTENTION, it all completed itself in a really nice, circular fashion. Also something I find with Charles Grant’s work that I find lacking in a lot of horror today: the story and the prose itself demands I pay attention.

And quite frankly, I like that.  A lot.

Next week, I’ll look at the second “quiet horror” author I discovered, Charles L. Grant.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine, and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he’s currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

*that review was totally made up, and doesn’t reflect any real review of any of these books, that I know of.

There I was.

A total neophyte in the horror genre, completely out of my element, at NECON 30, one of the most revered speculative writing conferences in the Northeast.  Even more intimidating, folks like F. Paul Wilson, Tom Monteleone, Christopher Golden, Douglas Clegg and more had been attending this thing for YEARS, so they were like one big family.  Mix in relative but established newcomers like Nate Kenyon, Rio Youers, and  Norman Prentiss;  and little ole’ me, very literally, felt like a bug on a mansion wall. I SO totally did not belong (though everyone there was friendly, welcoming, and relaxed).

However, I was on mission.  Sure, I’d been fortunate, had some things published, including a novella, but I didn’t want to rest on that. I wanted to be around the “big boys and gals”, not to bask in their aura, but to learn.  To hear how they’d done it, and think about how I could take what I’d learned and apply it to my efforts.

So there I was, during some downtime one afternoon, wandering through the used book tables in the vendor area.  The guy who’d read nothing but Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub for years.  Certainly excellent reading, but not too varied.  I’d read some different authors at that point – a thorough stable of Leisure Fiction horror authors (before Leisure went belly-up) – but my background was solidly built upon those three authors.  I sorta kinda knew LOTS of other folks had written horror, but I’d never  taken the time to explore horror’s rich history.

And then I found it.

A novel called The Place, written by some guy named T. M. Wright.  I picked it up, checked out the back cover and read the synopsis:

Greta King is scared.  There’s no one home, and she’s locked out. Something is very wrong.

Even The Place, Greta’s imaginary world, is touched by terror.  The bright blue sky has turned black-red, and the magical cats won’t talk anymore.

Ella King is scared, too.  She and Greta’s little brother Justin are trapped in a dark, damp cell underground, prisoners of a madman who kills as if death were his to dispense by divine right.

The Place is both real and imaginary.  It is sanctuary and prison, playground and battlefield…and deadly.

An intriguing description, definitely.  But not necessarily mind blowing.  What got me is when I flipped to the inside cover and read the following blurb, by some guy (who’d I’d yet to discover, also), named Ramsey Campbell:

“T. M. Wright is more than a master of quiet horror fiction: he is a one-man definition of the term.”

I did a double-take.

Quiet horror?

What’s that?  So I bought it, started reading.

Haven’t stopped reading T. M. Wright or quiet horror since. And thus began my serious exploration of all the horror writers who had come before me.

Now, there are more parts to this story.  Like how I – THANKFULLY – discovered Charles Grant‘s work, when someone compared Norman Prentiss’ award-winning novella, Invisible Fences to Grant’s work. Or the night I spent with Paul Wilson and Tom Monteleone, which was like a history class in speculative fiction, all in itself. Or listening to Brian Keene’s AnthoCon keynote address, ‘Roots’, about the history of horror fiction.

But T. M. Wright’s The Place was the first, the one that set me on this path to begin with.

So starting this Thursday – in between my monthly reviews here at The Diner – I’m going to present what I’d like to call a ‘Modest History of Horror’ (modest, because I’m hardly an expert, and discovering all this myself) and highlight some of the classic works I’ve been digging into this past year. Works that I’m going to go out on a limb and say if anyone is serious about writing horror – or, ergo, serious about submitting horror fiction to The Midnight Diner – they WILL read.

Because you can’t write good new stuff, unless you have a foundation to stand on, without knowing what’s already been done, and how it can be done again, but made new.

So, this Thursday.  A few works from the “one man definition of quiet horror”, T. M. Wright.

See you there.

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine, and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he’s currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.