The horror genre was a major part of my life for decades but this year I have decided to take a step back, especially in what I read, because horror and I need a little bit time apart. For reasons…
First off: I am still a big fan of horror and will continue to make up a major portion of my media consumption and production.
We just need to maybe see other people for a bit.
Second, The long-and-short of this post is that horror utterly dominated my media landscape for over two decades but this year I am taking the conscious decision to try other genres and themes [except maybe movies, because non-horror movies barely interest me unless they happen to feature Kamen Riders, kaiju, etc]. Exceptions will surely abound.
Now read on if you want, but I just spoiled the overall thing.
Too familiar to be shocking, too shocking to be comfort food.
How horror ended up being a HUGE part of my life…
I don’t quite remember, not off the top of my head, a precise timeline for becoming a horror mega-nerd. I got exposed to stuff like Nightmare on Elm Street around the age of 8 and Night of the Living Dead [the remake first, then the original via some sort of demo-CD to show how the future was digital media, which was fun] at also a fairly early age [mid teens for the original].
The lattermost, the black-and-white original NotLD, was life changer. As was hearing the name H.P. Lovecraft and reading him in the late 90s. As was my getting heavy into Stephen King in the late 80s.
There are a number of moments in my life where media altered my self-conception and horror was a majority of those. Despite this, I was put off by horror as often as not as a teen. Cheap production values. Exploitative practices. The pointlessness of it all. Things like that would take me out. For every Pumpkinhead, there was a Pumpkinhead 2, as it were.
Somewhere in the very early 2000s, though, horror had become a major aspect of my personality. Horror movies. Horror books. Horror games. Generally if I was consuming/playing/creating something it would have at least a bit of horror or would be the kind of thing that horror fans might like [gritty fiction, the kind of comedy that appealed to the same demographics]. Eventually, most everything I read and watched, with one exception, was horror.
The exception, by the way, was tokusatsu. Toku remains my second true love.
Well, two. Stuff that Kaz watched with me is the third most important genre. Horror then tokusatsu then stuff Kaz likes that I also like.
The absolute heyday of the mega-nerd…
I would guess, but not state like a fact, that somewhere between 2003-2016 was my absolute heyday. Stuff like The Ring and finding Laird Barron just resonated at different times to keep the fires burning. The post-28 Days Later/Dawn of the Dead-remake zombie craze was a major focus of my friend group and started creeping into my creative process. There were lots of Lovecraft-themed boardgames, stacks of short story collections with names like Children of the Son of Cthulhu’s Nephew’s Cult, and the DVD-home market became full of classic horror movies and proper indie releases. You could go to stores in relatively small cities and find entire stacks of Japanese Horror being translated officially for the first time.
Authors like Carlton Mellick III were being printed and sold in ways you could find them and share them. It helped that I worked in and then started managing a bookstore and had better access to deep catalogs.
You also saw the increasing growth of blogs, forums, and social media from Twitter to Reddit. By the early 2010s, I was a regular reviewer and commenter in various formats. The Dickens of a Blog that I started self-hosting over a half-decade before had horror-centric content baked into its structure with zombies and other horror topics being some of the prime menu items.
I took part in a round-table discussion about how Cthulhu was mis-represented. I would get emails from authors thanking me for my reviews or asking me to look at stuff. I got quoted at least once in a marketing blurb about a book, maybe other times I didn’t know about. I taught a class for Osher Lifelong Learner Institute about 20th Century horror and its relation to social changes. I gave well-attended lectures about Lovecraft and Ligotti and vampires and other horror-themed talks. I even wrote walkthroughs for horror games and met some fun people that way. I ran demos for horror RPGs.
I was never the expert. Never a big name. But I hung out with up-and-comings and I regularly helped promote and comment on things. I was part of the community and some people who hung out with me online did so because they liked the way I talked about things.
That sense of community is partially why it struck a chord with me, but it was also a sense that horror was a primal genre. Mythologies are as much horror as drama. Folklore frequently touches upon horror themes. The fear of the unknown drives so much of our personal energies.
It’s not so much that I was out of touch with the problematic aspects of the genre, or some of the crappy writing/production, I was just in a place where I could actually discuss things from various perspectives. I knew the names of people leading the discourse. I knew counter-examples. Like how you can’t get within twenty-feet from Lovecraft-adjacent media without someone saying, “but he was really racist! more than others in his time!,” while giving Conan the Barbarian a pass despite Robert E. Howard’s equal-or-more-racist writings. And then there is Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, etc.
Having a grasp of the conversation within various eras of horror was pretty intriguing to me, and gave me a lot of tools to understand a lot of stuff outside of the horror genre.
Another element that drove to horror was also something perhaps more insidious to the modern reader and enjoyer of media: there is too much stuff out there to really risk straying too far from a core experience. Sure, there are plenty of people who read/watch/play across genres, but people tend to develop themes or flounder in a sea of new releases and old favorites. Sometimes that theme is something pretty simple/external, such as mostly focusing on stuff that is popular and well-talked about in general. Sometimes that theme is pretty internal/complex, such as only reading books about speculative military style combat (SPACE MARRINNNNNES!).
For me, my life raft was horror. I knew people. Both in the sense of actually communicating with people but also just knew certain tastes so when they said something was good or bad I had a sense of how I would take it. I knew the various strengths of publishers. I had a good idea of which reviewers to trust. It was a lagoon in a body of new creations where I could tell how the winds were blowing without getting washed out into an ocean.
Those who tried to convince me I would like Bentley Little, though, screw you guys. You lied to me.
Watching as the spark start to fade…
Going back to my first point, way up yonder, I still really like horror. I still keep up, roughly, with new releases. Follow a few authors. Even outside of horror, a lot of my favorite examples across various genres tend to involve horror-tinged stuff.
I mean, hell, one of the reason that I like Dungeon Crawler Carl is because it is so horror coded.
I just…I need a break. I can’t quite do it any more. Sustained tension just hits different now that I’m older. Violent torture stuff has never been quite my bag and I feel like this is spreading ever wider unless there is strength to it. Strength of writing, strength of purpose, strength of character. Even outside of horror, my ability to enjoy any cruelty in fiction is fraught. I don’t like mean comedies or mean dramas. I’m not going to give it a pass just because it gets shelved in the horror section.
There have been some horror novels I’ve read where I just want it to end. Movies where I go and spoil the plot before even watching it just to save myself time. Horror shows I just stop and never restart. Sometimes its the sense of manipulation in the structure and sometimes its the meanness in the intent. Things I once could overlook or at least work with just sit at odd angles to me.
This started as a minority of things, but it grew in number. I am increasingly hesitant to watch/read something unless I’m pretty sure the degrees to which suffering will be celebrated over survival. I have gotten to a point in the last couple of years where I will have five books in front of me and will take days to figure out which one to start so I didn’t get trapped in a misery hole.
This blended with realizing I had spent something like two decades largely ignoring new releases that weren’t horror-pilled, and that I was just curious what else was out there.
So I said…let’s chill on the horror as the core experience. Let’s try some new things. Some LitRPG books. Some science fiction. Some light novels. Maybe some weird fantasy. A few Japanese mysteries. Just get out there and catch up a bit.
For this, I mostly mean books because I just can’t with most movies in general, but still…
While enjoying my mostly-break so far [I am currently listening to the audiobook for Matt Dinniman’s The Grinding, and on my to-be-read pile is Adam Nevill Monumental, so it’s not an absolute break], it has had me think about why horror isn’t so automatically resonating with me. I figured it might fun, and self-informational, to try and lay out a few pieces of this.
Some fairly specific, and some fairly personal, reasons…
I can think of two specific life-altering moments that directly impacted my read of horror. Then a few others general changes in consumption habits and online activity.
PERSONAL LIFE CHANGES
(1) [TRIGGER WARNING: PERSONAL TRAUMA. IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO GUN VIOLENCE OR LOSS OF LIFE, SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH.] Back in one the highest output moments of my writing horror reviews, I got asked by an up-and-coming author to read and review one of her books. I cannot recall the name of this author, nor the name of the book, and I wouldn’t “name and shame” if I could because what happened next has nothing to do with the book itself. The plot had one of my least favorite tropes in the genre: someone gets taunted into doing bad acts and spirals out of control, where we are meant to consider them the “good one” despite them committing atrocities because they were { tricked | coerced | forced | drugged | etc}. I generally hate “trapped and caged” fiction unless it finds clever angles. There was a passage about the main character being taunted into shooting a dog and it was clearly building up to him being forced to shoot a person and right as I was reading that I got a phone call that my younger brother was shot while running away from a fight. Fatally shot, I mean. He died within hours of this. Trying to push through that book after getting that news made me fucking despise the book, the trope, and all the glorifications of gun violence as a plot point. I deleted the book from my shelf. Even then, it took me months to be fully able to handle blasé uses of personal violence for entertainment across any genre. I have never been able to return to a few particular flavors of horror after that. [END TRAUMA DUMP.]
(2) The second was actually much happier for me, the exact opposite of the above: my daughter was born in 2017. This impacted my ability to take horror in two direct ways. First: it became pretty damned hard to watch horror movies with a young, fairly sensitive kid. This meant I was more limited when it came to not only movies but also book covers, games, and such that she might see. She is aware that her dad is a horror nerd, but I try to respect her limits. Secondly: it deeply highlighted how much horror-trauma is rooted in the loss of children. All those plots of people being upset at the death of a child or involving the suffering of kids just irritated and even infuriated me. Possibly because of the above personal loss. Just in case you haven’t noticed, a LOT of horror from a certain era is essentially turning loss of the family unit as a entertainment factor.
Outside of these terrible and terribly-awesome life changes, there are some other elements…
CHANGES TO CONSUMPTION
(3) My withdrawing from most online communities is a big deal, too. As I pulled away from social media in general after 2020, I also lost my access to most of the discourse around horror. It got to where Reddit’s horrorlit and horror subreddits were most of my interaction with a wider horror community – one much different from back in my heavy Twitter-and-blog days – and then I soured even on that. Even my own blog went dark [in 2016, for reasons] and so I was only posting reviews to Goodreads. While I met several people with like interests there, it was much less an active discourse and much more a show-and-tell amongst similarly minded folk.
(4) I stopped pushing hard to buy into the collector’s market and that further disconnected me from hanging in specific circles where particular writers were a major watchword. I still buy a few limited edition books but more and more it’s a minor thing for me. I suppose the shake-ups in the horror publishing where several publishers went broke is part of it. Big box stores, and big publishers, lived while the more author-reading-centric spaces began to fade. Maybe something like Patreon or Facebook groups, but somewhat eh to both, because of #3.
These two things meant that finding horror meant I had to cast out into a larger sea and larger seas require guideposts, which meant…
I Went Perhaps Too Niche but Also Too Wide…
(5) One solution was that I went even more niche. Trying to avoid horror that didn’t swing around easy family trauma and being put off by glorifying violence meant I ended up going more and more into older horror. Ghost stories. Old weird fiction. Newer stuff that clearly referenced that stuff. I was finding interesting fiction on my own and then allowing Amazon/etc to suggest related items and weeding through those.
It was kind of nice in that it was a aspect of the genre that had been there for me since the beginning. It was primal. The kind of stories about the basic descent into the dark. That’s exactly what I needed, but also meant that caught up in trying to find stories that either tended to be in $0.99 mega-pack ebooks or really expensive out-of-print/limited-edition books, both with their own flaws. It also meant there was a lot more short story collections. I adore a good horror short story but it can be hard to maintain a proper reading density when you are swapping plot every half-hour.
The mental break of reading lots of short stories and novellas is part, but not wholly, why I went from reading around 150-books per year to something like 30.
It had the side impact that I was reading stuff that was even less discussed, if at all, especially in the smaller circles. There’s something about reading the 20th terrible Seabury Quinn story in a row with no one to talk to about it that just sours it even further. If I had this blog at that time, it might have different, but this blog showed up around the time my mind was starting to let go and look for other things.
(6) On the other side, I also tried to read more of the kind of horror that was popular enough that everyone was talking about it, including outside of horror circles. Lots of stuff where the book cover was either movie poster or designed by someone who lists “too many to name” as their favorite books on Facebook, if you get my drift. Some of this was good, such as Tender Is the Flesh. Some not so much, at least not in the way that I had a firm history of it in mind.
I wasn’t there to see two authors talk to each other online about how some trope in one’s work was a reference to an element in another’s. It was just…popular. Which is not bad, per se. Just way more passive for me.
And there’s sort of a (6a), where much of the popular horror discussion was around podcasts and Youtube series and streaming shows and I was already just a bit too tired to chase that high.
Combined with the above…
Combine these six elements with my decreased enjoyment of tension, and you get a seventh damning thing…
(7) Part of the problem is that I have been there and done that. I’ve seen the tropes. I’ve analyzed the tropes. I’ve lectured about the tropes. I’ve watched very same-y plots play out in the same-y ways on repeat. Look, I’m always down to watch Samara Weaving smash face and take names, and am always down to watch Japanese found footage, but this puts horror in an uncomfortable spot for me:
Too familiar to be shocking, too shocking to be comfort food.
What does this mean for THIS blog?
In simple terms, pretty much nothing really.
I do not know if I will ever return to that 2014-era horror obsession. Around the time the phrase “Doug Talks Weird” got turned into a Youtube series. Around the time I gave a talk about Lovecraft and the paradox of anti-science by a pro-science nerd. Around the time I was trying to write my own horror stories. That time was a different me.
I went through some shit. I came out mostly ok but it took time.
But that primal nature of horror means it still deeply intrigues me as a genre. I want to keep reading and understanding it, but it will be specks of salt in a pool of water. Even if the water gets very salty, here or there, the water will continue to dominate as the important thing.
If I never return to reading more than a small handful of horror books and watching a handful of horror movies a year, I have such a huge backlog of reviews I want to bring over that I could stock this blog for a couple of years at least.
In principle, it probably does mean that a lot of non-horror/non-weird reviews will show up, here. There won’t just be random reviews of stuff completely out of the wheelhouse, but more speculative and broader fiction stuff. Things that I feel still match the Doug Talks Weird concept, just maybe less obviously weird.
We’ll see.