Writing a Short Horror Story

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Everyone enjoys a good scare. The breath pulls in, the heart skips a beat and then races, adrenaline flows — it is a stimulant and even a catharsis. If you’re not harmed, the momentary perception of risk is sublime. What could be better? I’ll tell you. To draw that five seconds out to five minutes, or even an hour. That’s horror fiction. It’s the combined effect of a good story with a prolonged sense of unease, culminating in existential dread. Best of all, after the climax, you can close the book and stand up unharmed. Your knees might be a bit weak.

My own opinion is that the short story is the best form of horror. You can build quickly and pull the reader’s head back and frighten them, or engage a deeper sense of horror. The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between dropping a fake spider in someone’s lap or doing a long con like arranging a fake séance. The longer form can fall down of its own weight.

So you’re going to write a short horror story. What are the important things you have to do?

Your ingredients should include:

Identity. Your reader needs to care about someone in the story, caught up in a situation that is increasingly dark and fatal. Give them someone they can identify with.
Care about your protagonist(s):
– The reader should fear for them, and thus feel fear themselves.
– Your main characters should reflect the reader’s own persona.
– Horror is the loss of control in what should be familiar and safe.
Show them a character they can feel for, then put them in jeopardy.

Fear. Some primal fear needs to permeate the story. The story needs to be soaked in something simple and inescapable. It needs to ooze fear. At any point, the reader should be feeling trepidation as if some unknown person is going to draw the point of a razor across their palm.
But, evoke other strong emotions if you can:
– Revulsion and possibly disgust.
– Pathos, empathy, sympathy, even for the evil you invoke.
– Panic. Difficult to do on a printed page, but even its shadow is effective.
– Sadness which is pathos’s cousin. Horror shouldn’t be happy, usually.
Play on their heartstrings with a claw hammer.

Plot. You need a strong story.
Go to the well:
– What scared you in your favorite horror stories?
– What myths or ghost stories can you crib from?
– What true-life horror can you use as a base?
You have many cultures to chooses from, they all have ghost stories and tales of pride fallen.

Suprise. You need to lead your reader in one direction, raise their expectations, and then jolt them, get them off balance. Throw their belief system into shock. Show them, and through their senses, your reader; something awful, and familiar, and unbearable.
Be precise in your use of gore and squick.
– The genre varies in this, dial it up, carefully.
– What level elevates the story?
– What audience do you want?
Pick your market, how explicit your story is will differentiate pulp from literature.

Mystery. Your protagonist or the reader must be provided with a mystery, one which increases in importance through your narrative until the consequences of solving it or not become fatal.
You can make this a minor element or blend in mystery as a major component:
– Your degree of mystery can range from ‘What is behind the door?’ to ‘Have they really walled up the Baroness in the cellar?’
– The protagonist can be led by details, clues in manuscripts, or their own endeavors.
– Hiding a mystery inside another mystery is quite realistic.
Best of all, getting an answer that is shockingly unlike the ones they expected can be a climax.

Foreshadowing. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand foretells the storm. Any sign, from a gloomy day, a dead sparrow on the windowsill, or the shadowy figure of a man in the forest.
Show the doom that is coming:
– Give your reader the small signs of a greater evil.
– Help them to a stunning realization in small pieces.
Foreshadowing can help walk the story from normalcy and safety towards the pit of horror you are about to throw everyone into.

Suspense. Your story has to follow a rising arc, one where a shadow first appears, then events draw and stack one upon each other towards a crisis. The turns and twists after this are where your story can pull the curtain aside suddenly, or roll towards an inevitable doom.
Make your reader want to stop, but compel them to keep going:
– Make your story strong, and make your characters drive the story.
– Consequences should be fatal or worse.
– Walk the reader through a course of action.
– Accelerate the pace.
– Slap the reader in the face with a climax.
This is how you make it a page-turner.

Block out a story arc, storyboard it, do research to flesh out believable details, then write, write, write. Make yourself shiver.

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