I can see my grandmother now, hawk-eyed and hyper-vigilant as she looks up from her evening paper in alarm and whispers to my mother, “Did you hear something upstairs?”
As if on cue, my mother gets up, arms herself with an umbrella (hers being a generation of women that had not yet embraced the virtues of the semi-automatic) and proceeds up the stairs, to confront what sort of ghastly fate one can only imagine. The first place she would check for an intruder would be under the bed (since we all know that’s where psycho killers, rapists, and bogeymen lie in wait for us all). As a young child, it never made sense to me – it seemed we should be running out the front door rather than poking umbrellas into dangerous places.
As far as I know, my mother never found anything scarier than dust bunnies under the bed, but this and far more outrageous Southern Gothic looniness laid for me a firm belief system that, beneath a superficial veneer of grim banality, the world is actually a madhouse of danger and weirdshit depravity, much of it lurking just below the surface of one’s own family – even within one’s own mind!
Clearly the only reasonable vocation for a person raised in such a hothouse of creeping dread is that of horror writer (or possibly stand-up comic).
In a way, though, I know I received an interesting, if perhaps dubious, blessing – the compulsion to write horror fiction. It’s all in my head anyway, why not put it on paper? I love having access to the bizarre and creepy fantasies within my own imagination. It’s like having a private attic full of wondrous monstrosities and dark grimoires to explore and peruse at my leisure.
Which I’ve been doing for quite a few years now. When I wrote the novel THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES, I got to explore extremes of erotica well beyond what I’ve known in real life. In the novella “Spree” I created a vengeance-obsessed protagonist who acts on his fury in ways few sane people would ever resort to. And in the short story “Extremophiles” for the anthology AXES OF EVIL, my characters find out the hard way what I already suspected a long time ago, that the world, in fact, the very cosmos, is definitely out to get us.
Writing about the lurid, the perverse, the unspeakable has a surprising reward – it makes the real world with all its horrors seem safer, more manageable, and definitely, in a weird way, more fun!