The Counter Craft Halloween Horror Writing Guide

🚨New book announcement! 🚨Plus, unlocking bone-chilling articles from the archives

Happy Halloween, everyone. I’m a year-round horror reader, but do step up my spooky reads when October arrives. I had less reading time this October, in part because I’ve been working on my own forthcoming horror novel which… was just announced!

I’m very excited about this one, and thrilled to be working again with the great Sean deLone and Atria Books. And many thanks to my brilliant agent Angeline Rodriguez and WME. More spine-tingling information about this blood-curdling novel in the future.

Back to spooky reads. I did my regular reread of Shirley Jackson’s haunted house classic The Haunting of Hill House, which remains one of the most terrifying and also hilarious horror novels. On this reread, I had thoughts about Jackson’s use of POV, which I wrote about here on Counter Craft. I also reread Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream—a modern horror classic imho, and several of my students this semester said it became instantly one of their favorite books—and Brian Evenson’s last collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight. Evenson is the best short fiction horror writer around. His work always delivers uncanny unease and sharp-as-teeth prose.

Uketsu

In terms of new novels, I read and loved Dan Chaon’s wild-adventure-slash-dark-carnival novel One of Us (and interviewed him for this newsletter). And I read both Strange Pictures and Strange Houses by Japanese phenomenon Uketsu. This author apparently publishes popular picture-based video mysteries and only ever appears in a black bodystocking with a white mask. I enjoy a good weirdo schtick like that. The novels themselves were smartly constructed mysteries and very quick reads—there are a lot of pictures and diagrams—though also a bit silly and sometimes narratively cheap. (E.g., third-person POV chapters where the character hides basic information from the reader for no logical reason except that the author is withholding it for a twist.) I found Houses to be more gripping at first but ultimately less satisfying by the end. So, I’d probably recommend Strange Pictures of the two.

I also revisited Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I had not read since childhood. The original illustrations remain creepy and the stories are, well, certainly geared toward children. But many were quite fun. I’d forgotten that the series was a sort of Brothers Grimm-style work that collected classic horror myths and tales from around the country and world. The piece I remembered best was “The Hearse Song,” which apparently I’d memorized as a kid:

---

Halloween’s arrival also prompted me to look through the Counter Craft archives and realize I’ve written quite a few pieces about the craft of horror fiction. Instead of rehashing what I’ve written about before, I decided I would unlock my archived horror posts and collect them here. I publish all articles for free, but paywall much of the archive. The paywall on these will be removed for the next few weeks. If you like the articles, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

First up is a “Horror Terms 101” article that gives quick definitions of concepts like “terror vs. horror,” “gross out,” “the uncanny,” and “the sublime.”

This next piece is a longer dive into the distinction between “horror” and “terror” in literary theory. The distinction dates back to Gothic literature in the 1800s, and was famously described by Ann Radcliffe in her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” (“Poetry” here refers to Shakespeare. The article is really about fiction.) Roughly speaking, terror is the tense feeling of dread you get when the monstrous is near but obscured, while horror is the revulsion you feel when the monstrous reveals itself. Strange sounds in the middle of the night evoke terror. Seeing a zombie burst through the door and bite your arm evokes horror. I go more in-depth here:

This next article does a deeper dive into the horror concept I find the most fruitful and fascinating: “the uncanny.” This concept, which has been discussed by psychologists like Freud and Jung as well as countless horror authors and literary theorists, is essentially the combination of attraction and repulsion we feel when something is simultaneously familiar and strange. Your lover being replaced by a robotic replica, say, or discovering a mysterious passageway in your house.

Lastly, an article that repeats some information covered in the above and also offers up an attempt to describe what I call “the grotesque sublime”:

Happy reading, and I hope everyone has a good ol’ spooky time this weekend.

---

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.