Old horror writer back from the dead…
Exploring the art and technique of horror fiction—from genre history and literary analysis to practical lessons about creating fear, building atmosphere, and crafting stories that haunt readers long after the final page.
Time to Get Personal In my first two posts, I talked about the foundations of horror fiction and what the masters have taught us about the craft. Now it’s time to get personal–and to be completely honest about something I’m attempting that might be foolish, fascinating, or both: AI horror writing. At 77, after getting … Read more
Through the Masters’ Eyes In my first post, I talked about how Frankenstein and Dracula created the templates for modern horror fiction. Now let’s dig into the craft of horror writing and what the writers who’ve actually mastered the genre have to say about scaring readers. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as … Read more
If you want to understand modern horror fiction–the kind that kept readers up at night in the paperback boom of the 1970s and 80s, the kind I spent decades writing–you need to go back to two novels that essentially invented the genre as we know it: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). … Read more