The Writing Show (WS): Marty Young is president and founder of the Australian Horror Writers Association. Currently finishing his Ph.D. in paleo-oceanography, Marty is co-editor of Macabre: The New Era in Australian Horror which will be published in 2006. Marty’s first short story will be released on Halloween, 2005, as part of the Shadow Box e-anthology, and his first novel, 809 Jacob, is finished but awaiting some minor edits before he finds a home for it.
Welcome to The Writing Show, Marty. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Marty Young (MY): Thank you, Paula.
WS: Tell us about your organization, the Australian Horror Writers Association.
MY: The Australian Horror Writers Association unofficially formed in late 2003. We’re a nonprofit organization set up to provide a sense of community for Australian writers of horror while helping the evolution and development of this genre within Australia. We do that through offering things like writing resources, latest news, competitions, articles, advice, discussions on the genre itself, and we’re always working on new projects. I guess we’re foremost a writing organization, but we don’t restrict membership on that basis. One reason is because, I think, the film industry in particular is an important aspect of the genre, and we’re keen to incorporate that element within the Horror Writers Association. We’re also foremost an Australian organization obviously, but again, we don’t want to restrict membership on the basis of nationality or where they live, so we welcome writers and those interested in horror from all parts of the world.
WS: Can you tell us a little about some of your projects, and then I’d like to talk a lot about writing horror stories.
MY: We’ve got the Australian Shadows, which are awarded annually for the best horror story written by an Australian, published either in Australia or overseas. We have an anthology called Macabre: The New Era in Australian Horror. I’m co-editing that with Angela Challis. That will showcase the best Australian horror stories from the past plus the best ones today.
WS: How can people get hold of that anthology?
MY: We’re hoping to have national distribution in Australia, so hopefully that should be available quite easily from bookstores, or definitely online through the Australian Horror Writers Association. Also, we ran the flash and short story competition for the first time this year, and that was for unpublished stories. We were very lucky in that Dark Animus, an Australian magazine, offered to publish the first three winning entries of the short story category, and Shadowed Realms published the first three winning entries of the flash fiction competition. We’ve got the Southern Horror Yahoo group, which is our official online forum, and that was set up specifically for horror and dark fiction writers and fans to talk about everything related to horror.
WS: Oh, fans too. Not just writers.
MY: Fans are important for writers, aren’t they? You can write all you want, but if you have no one to buy your books or to read your stories....
WS: You say that’s a Yahoo group. How can people find that group?
MY: There’s a link to that on the Australian Horror Writers Association Web site. You can just click on that and sign up.
WS: And the Australian Horror Writers Association Web site, what is the address of that?
MY: Our Web site is AustralianHorror.com. We also have a number of articles on horror and writing written by our members. We have articles devoted to getting published by editors and agents and published writers. We also want to forge greater bonds with all the avenues releasing horror in Australia, especially the small presses, which are so vital to the genre because they’re the ones that publish stories by unknown authors and they’re the ones who take the chances.
WS: Let’s talk about horror itself because—well, I know it sounds a little strange to say—but it seems to me it’s such a fun genre. What exactly is horror?
MY: Perhaps before I answer that I’ll just say that the word "horror" has such a bad reputation. It’s got a past, and not a particularly pleasant one. A lot of publishers shy away from it because of all the rubbish that’s been produced. There was a boom time in the 1980s. Everyone wanted to write horror. They wanted to emulate Stephen King’s success, and I guess the magic was lost eventually. You get the same thing coming out all the time. Everyone loses interest in it. And you get terms like “dark fiction” and “dark speculative fiction,” which take their place to avoid the preconceptions people have of the genre. But I’m happy just to stick to the word “horror.”
To answer your question, I don’t think anyone’s answer can be used to explain what horror is exactly, because I think it’s almost something personal. Paula Guran in 1997 wrote an essay called “The Meaning of the ‘H’ Word,” and she said horror is defined by each reader and writer in an individual way. And that’s how I see it. The dictionary I have on my desk is The New English Dictionary. The definition of horror in that goes, “Horror is a strong feeling caused by something frightful or shocking.” And there’s another writer, Douglas E. Winter, who said in Primeval, I think it was, that horror is not a genre: horror is an emotion. So, if that’s the case, if you’re going to call horror an emotion, then horror elements can be found in absolutely every kind of story, any genre, because wherever you have a human, you’re going to have emotions. And feelings of fear and unease are always going to be there, aren’t they? Death is always going to be a part of our life, and everyone’s pretty scared of death. Okay, it might be an emotional experience, but I think horror literature is that which seeks to draw out and exploit those feelings in whichever way the writer chooses to make them the focus of the character’s journey through the story.
I think horror is that which makes me feel unsettled, gives me pause and makes me wonder what might be out there looking in at me, or licking its lips and wondering how tasty I might be. I love monsters. I prefer books and movies that have monsters in them. Not monsters of the human kind, although when I was growing up, I used to love all the slasher flicks and the serial killer books. I used to also love splatter punk, which is the violent, extreme form of horror. But at the moment, I enjoy the more quiet school, where the things suggested are far more frightening than what you see.
For me, horror works on different levels. You’ve got the terror level: you hear a noise at night but you can’t see what’s making it, so your imagination starts providing you with images, and you wonder what it is. Then you’ve got the horror of actually coming face to face with whatever was making that noise and seeing the monster that’s out to get you. And then you’ve got the disgust: the monster gets your wife or your husband or someone in your family and starts pulling out their brains. I don’t think all three levels are necessary in any one particular story. But for me at least, there’s something almost satisfying about seeing the beast that’s out to get you. It’s like you get to that peak and you wonder, “Will I ever see it? Will I ever see it?” and then suddenly it’s there. And it’s quite satisfying.
WS: It’s almost a release in a way.
MY: That’s right.
WS: From the uncertainty at least.
MY: Yes. Before you see it, you’re always wondering, “Oh my god, what is it? How bad is it going to be? It’s going to be terrible.” And you always think the worst, so hopefully when you see it, you might go, “Oh well, that’s all right. It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought.” Or it could be even worse.
WS: That’s a good point. I’d like to come back to that in a minute when I ask you about the techniques that horror writers use, but first I’d like to ask you why do you think people enjoy being scared so much? Well let’s put it this way. I don’t mean in general being scared, but I mean why do we like horror stories so much? I’m not sure we necessarily enjoy being scared in real life.
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