Title: Whispers and Fangs
Author: Meagan Noel Hart
Genre: Flash Horror/Fiction Collection
Synopsis:
At its best, horror shakes us to our core and makes us cringe at our own humanity. It terrifies and humbles and offers a hell of a good time. Whether it’s a lonely ghost story or a gruesome murder, this collection of short and flash fiction offers 27 different glimpses into the dark and unnerving world that haunts us all. Open the book and unlock unstable minds, become a murder weapon, live as a ghost, and provoke the demons that haunt the edge of your vision. Don’t worry, it’s only fiction. Or is it?
Special Guest Article, Straight from the Author!
Writing
Horror With a Pulse
By
Meagan Noel Hart
Whenever I assign Stephen King, I assign his
short story “The Last Rung on the Ladder.” In the story, Larry remembers in
vivid detail the day, decades ago, that he both endangered and saved his
sister’s life. It’s a beautifully detailed scene where Kitty hangs from a
broken barn ladder and a fretful Larry rushes to lay down hay to cushion her
fall. Since growing up, they’ve fallen out of touch with one another. The story
ends by revealing that Kitty has committed suicide. Two weeks after her death,
Larry receives the following letter:
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately,”
Kitty writes, “and what I've decided is that it would have been better for me
if that last rung had broken before you could put the hay down.” Or in other
words, I wish I’d never been saved at all.
There is a lot to say about this story, but
the first thing my students turn to is the deep emotional rush at the story’s
completion and the sudden need to call their families. After that, there is
usually some kind of comment of surprise. “Wait, isn’t this the guy that wrote It?” Yes, and The Shining, and Misery,
and Cujo, and Carrie. King is an extremely prolific writer, but there is no
question that his best-known works are those of supernatural horror. The
question my students really mean to ask is -- how could someone who writes
horror also write something like this?
This question actually gets to an inherent
misunderstanding about writing horror.
While what might stand out to us about the
scariest of stories are the building suspense, the jump scenes, an
unforgettable monstrosity, and a lot of running in the dark, the truth is that
good horror also has to have heart, and it has to tug, often indirectly, at the
most internal and human struggles within.
We fear the dark because we fear the unknown.
We fear possession because we fear that those we love may not be who we think
they are, or we fear losing control of ourselves. We fear poltergeists because
we fear that what is ours--the places we should feel most at home-- don’t
really belong to us. We fear slasher films because we fear we live in a society
where such violence happens everyday and there is no way to stop it. We fear
zombies because they challenge our understanding of life and science, and we
indulge in them because they allow us to live in a world without the stresses
of school, work, social obligation, and debt.
My favorite modern monsters are the weeping
angels of the Doctor Who series.
Angelically gorgeous statutes that can’t move while you’re looking at them, but
which spring to gruesome life the second no one is looking, moving faster than
imaginable. If they catch you, then they steal you away to another time and
place, feeding on all your lost potential. I mean, can you think of a single
better metaphor for the sudden passing of time itself?
While some would write horror off as mere
genre fiction, easy scares, shallow characters, and plots with nagging holes
like “if the aliens can’t touch water why would they come to Earth naked?” --
the truth is, good horror isn’t really about the monster. The monster, if
anything, makes the story palpable. It is something that can be fought,
defeated, sorted out. We get a rush from facing and conquering our fears. Even
if the characters do not survive, we do. And those last minute scenes of the
hand popping out of the dirt or a hint that the monster isn’t really defeated
are so effective because we know the real fear can never really die.
Horror can even be crafted directly around
exaggerated, dreaded social challenges. Like the SAW films. People don’t linger on the ridiculous puppet riding a
bicycle. What eats at them are the morally preposterous positions the victims
are put into. In order to save yourself and your boyfriend, do you kill the
girl he cheated with? Or do you let him die so the two people he wronged can
live? Can you even trust your fellow victims?
Ultimately, to write good horror, you have to
tap into something much more human and banal than monsters: our primal fears,
worries, concerns, and all those unanswered questions that haunt us in the
night. Do they really love me? Am I an imposter? Without all those nagging
social obligations and rules, would I survive? Could I save my family?
And, you have to let this connection happen
naturally. Like all good ideas, and arguably all good metaphors, you need to
trust your subconscious to take you somewhere meaningful, allowing the words
and ideas to flow without judgement, and only after it is finished -- trust the
conscious editor within to take the reins and make it pretty.
While there are many questions you can ask as
you edit your horror story -- How do I build suspense? Are my characters well
developed? Should I kill them anyway? Is the language here too vivid or
gruesome? -- none of them are going to
matter if you didn’t ask the first, most important question, before you started
writing:
What scares you?
And remember, it’s not really the clown.
About the Author
Meagan loves a good scary story, but besides that one time she's pretty sure she caught a ghost on camera, her life is pretty normal. She usually writes flash fiction but occasionally poetry or essays.
Her work has been included in Mothers Always Write, Everyday Fiction, Welter, and Unusual Pet Tales, and will be included in the Writers Workout's 72 Hours of Insanity in 2017.
She has three collections of work, Twisted Together, Whispers & Fangs, and A Short Stack of Silly Shorts for the Morally Sidetracked. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, two rambunctious but lovable sons, and a house full of fur-babies. By day, you can find her teaching English at Stevenson University. She maintains a healthy fear of the dark.
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