Horror & Crime

Part 1

I’m going to be on a panel at the New England Crime Bake where we’ll be talking about the intersection of crime and horror. What makes this a complex subject is that mystery/crime/thriller writers and horror writers have a vastly different view of horror fiction, and more specifically, horror writing. To help me organize my thoughts on this subject, I’m going to write two or more articles about it, and hopefully get some feedback to let me know where I’m full of shit.

I’m guessing a lot of mystery & crime & thriller writers (which I’m shortening from this point to mct writers) view of horror fiction comes from classic novels, like Frankenstein and Dracula, up to Stephen King. I’m also guessing King grew up reading a lot of mystery and crime novels because his writing has a lot of the same rhythm and style of classic mc writers (sharp language, plot follows a consistent story to a natural resolution, even with the monstrous and supernatural elements his writing is still grounded in realistic terms). Mct writing has evolved over the years and tends to have less description, but it’s still highly recognizable from mct fiction written 100 years ago, with writing from Hammett and Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark) every bit as lean as anything today. Horror fiction writing has evolved dramatically. Rhythm, tone, and stylistically, it’s vastly different now than mct fiction. The techniques it uses are foreign to mct writing. The goals of mct writing is to drive to a resolution. The goal of modern horror is to create dread.

I’ll be going into more detail with my next article on this subject.