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:
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.