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Horror can range from stories that elicit heart palpitations to cringing and nausea to an unease that won’t let go. Horror that makes me jump and then laugh at the adrenaline rush can be fun, and I can appreciate the imagery of a well-done slasher scene—both designed to shake us, give us a quick thrill?—but I generally seek out horror that evokes that unnameable unease, that makes me think and wonder and try to establish how the horror might fit in myself or the world I’m part of.

Horror and the Unknown

I think the unknown plays into most horror; however, I’m drawn to horror that remains a bit of a mystery, that entails the ambiguous, something that might lie within us if not without, or that we finally perceive with a sense of near awe because it is beyond our control and yet part of this world, not to go away.

Blurring the Line

In the new anthology Blurring the Line, editor Marty Young, founding president of the Australian Horror Writers Association and an Australian Shadows Award winner,  has pulled together stories that blur the line between reality and fiction, reflecting the strange, often surreal, mystery of our world. Each day, upon the book’s release, authors in the collection will answer some questions about horror, from what horror is to them to what writers have influenced them most.

I will add links to each interview below as they appear each day. Blurring the Line is now available, in time for holiday gifts or for a taste of the more sinister during the winter season bustle!

Interviews:

Marty Young

Tom Piccirilli

Lisa Morton

Tim Lebbon

Lia Swope Mitchell

Patricia J. Esposito is author of Beside the Darker Shore and has published numerous works in anthologies, such as Main Street Rag’s Crossing Lines, Cohesion Press’s Blurring the Line, AnnaPurna’s Clarify, Timbre’s Stories of Music, and Undertow’s Apparitions,and in magazines, including Not One of Us, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Rose and Thorn, Wicked Hollow, and Midnight Street. She has received honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Writing exercise 1: Choose a photo in a magazine or online, someone you don’t know. Choose a mood (eager, excited, sad, angry, in love, in lust, vengeful). Then free-write a description of the person.

Through black-rimmed glasses, his eyes squint under the tug of pure pleasure. He smiles, his high-boned cheeks a shine, hair fringed careless under baseball cap—a man caught in spontaneous and unaffected beauty. This is him, undiluted. What he feels, you will see. In those brown, summer-sun-flecked eyes, there is no lie. Anger glares hard; doubt calculates and surmises; frustration burns; mischief tempts and teases; he dares, he challenges, he demands. So when that strong jaw, etched with unshaven care, relaxes, when those luscious lips spread wide—white-smiling, cheek-appling, eye-glinting in glimmering-sun-rayed-dance—you dismantle in a tingling melt. Let it come: beauty in its most genuine essence. Him: life at its most worthwhile.

“The future of publishing: eighteen million authors in America, each with an average of fourteen readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.” — Garrison Keillor

My novel Beside the Darker Shore is due out this June. Arturo and Stephen are getting antsy waiting. They’d like to say hello via a short scene.

Stephen is a human blood prostitute in love with Boston’s human governor David Gedden. He wants the vampire Arturo to change David into a vampire so he can satisfy his lust for bloodletting with the man he loves. In this scene they’ve just abandoned David in a vampire club at the mercy of hungry vampires. (For reference, Alec is founder of Boston’s peaceful community of vampires.)

Arturo spotted Stephen beside the black traffic light, waiting to cross back to Alec’s splendid new vampire park. He met up with him before the light changed. He could feel Stephen’s heat already, five feet away, two feet. His breathing heavy and molten right through his chest.

Arturo pressed him against the light post, swept back the black satin hair, and placed a hand on Stephen’s burning forehead. “What do you want from him?” With his thumbs, he gently closed Stephen’s eyelids, closed those warm and frightened eyes.

“You know what I need.”

Frustrated, Arturo let him go. “I can’t make him a vampire if he won’t acquiesce.”

“I can’t have him any other way. If he won’t take your blood, then he’s useless to me. They’re not figuring out how to reverse immortality. That Elena, she just wants more immunity.”

Arturo studied Stephen, then checked back at the club entrance.

“So, do I rescue him?”

Stephen started across the street. “I’ll be at the park. I don’t need to watch the asshole fall in love with you.”

Arturo laughed delighted, and called after Stephen, “Can you blame him, mi bello?”

A vampire’s quick look at the proper use of “I” or “me” in sentences:

Most everyone is accustomed now to using “I” as the subject pronoun in a sentence:

“The vampire and I slipped through the city’s shadows, a chill without source.”

NOT

“The vampire and me slipped through the city’s shadows, a chill without source.”

After all, if you removed the vampire, would you say “Me slipped through the city’s shadows…”? No.

But because we’re taught to use “I” as a subject pronoun, saying, “The vampire and I slipped through the city’s shadows…” we often try to correct what isn’t wrong when it becomes the object:

“You glance behind at the trailing shadow with a shiver for him and I.”

or

“You glance behind at the trailing shadow with a shiver for him and me.”

Which is correct? The easiest way to find out is to remove the other person “him.”

“You glance behind at the trailing shadow with a shiver for I.”

or

“You glance behind at the trailing shadow with a shiver  for me.”

Obviously, you’d use “me.” “I” is the subject pronoun; “me” is the object pronoun.

“Anton and I raised our cups. You poured the blood for him and me.”

“Now it’s our turn. Cups to the sky, let’s milk the moonbeams, cream for the blood they’ve given you and me.”

REMEMBER: Remove the other person, and you’ll know which pronoun to use.

Every now and then (once in ten years?), the perfect story or novel title comes to me in a flash of brilliant perfection. For all the other thousand times I need a title, I fret, I struggle. In discouragement, I settle, and then I rethink, toil again. And still it’s just not right.

Titles are a chore for me. I’ve even had two magazine editors very generously suggest new titles for stories I’ve sent them. My gratitude is immense. I wish I could always have someone title my works for me. Like artists titling their paintings, I want to call my stories, “Vampire with Apples,” or “Graveyard at Dusk.” This just doesn’t do for someone working with words.

A recent blog post asked if titles are important. Yes, I think they are, though for me, often it’s after the fact. A title can draw us in to a story, or make us pick up a book, but often I find I don’t really notice the title until I’ve finished reading. Or maybe it’s that the title doesn’t quite take on meaning until I’ve read the work. Then, yes, then, I go back and say, ahhh, that’s what the author meant!

In titling my novel, Beside the Darker Shore, I removed the preposition a dozen times. Who needs prepositions? But in a sense, that was the point. Just as I chose “darker” rather than “dark.” The main character is a tentative, cautious man, who is more likely to skirt the edge than dive in. Also, he’s aware of the thrill of shorelines, both sunlit and moonlit, hopeful and deadly. He has to make a choice and spends the novel “beside” that choice, which is a bit “darker” than he’d like.

The same blog asked about character names. Are they important? We’ve all heard the advice about avoiding similar names, or names that begin with the same letters. Unfortunately, in that same novel, I’ve been unable to give up the similarly initialed Alec and Arturo. Alec represents reason and restraint; Arturo represents emotion and wild abandonment. They are the choices the main character faces. I wanted the similarity. I hope it doesn’t confuse the reader.

I nearly always look up the meaning of my characters’ names, and choose names based on meaning. But there are times the name comes to me and I simply see the character and I feel changing the name would be stealing his or her natural identity. Why is Stephen named Stephen in that same novel? I could say because it means “crown” or “wreath,” and he is the glorious and gorgeous immortal in the novel. But really, I just always liked that name and it came to me as him.

Whether the meaning matches the character or not, I do think the name should feel like the character, have a softness or harshness, a practicality or romanticism that settles easily with the reader. For me, Alec, which is harsher, could not be the romantic that Arturo is. And Stephen is softer than the protagonist David, who skirts that darker shore.

Titles, character names–I’ve heard some people say they use song lyrics for titles, that they pull names from the endless lists of baby-name sites. I’m always scouring those baby-name sites, or looking up derivations of words to find related names. When I’m struggling for my title, I take others’ advice–I search for an image that stands out in the story; I condense the theme to a phrase. Sometimes it works; sometimes, sigh, I seem to hit delete for weeks on end.

I’m wondering what you do. What comes easily? How much do you worry about a title or a name? I think back on character names that remain with me in books I’ve read, or in movies. I like that. And I like speaking a favorite book title with reverence or affection because it stands for something I love. Yes, they’re important to me. And when a story works, they become important to the reader.