Every writer has common themes around which their brains and hence stories fixate. If you read any author long enough, you will see the same turns of phrase, images, scenarios. You can even chronologically identify a work based on the author’s fixations at the time, like stratifications in an excavation.
I am no exception. I catch my own duplications, my own redundancies, my own favorites. If I take myself out of the writing and look at it objectively, I can identify my own tendencies. A reoccurring theme that has been emerging in my own writing is bad things happening to children. Even in the horror genre, this is an odd path to which to commit. Especially repeatedly.
My first book has a baby in the apocalypse. I wrote a Christmas horror short about a pedophilic Santa Claus. I recently drafted a piece about a monster after a newborn.
As a mother of young children, people ask why I would write about such a topic? Hell, I ask myself. Often.
For me, writing horror is an outlet, as in venting things OUT. I write about the darkness already in my brain to get it out and off of my mind. I document my fears, my worst imaginings. I draft the ultimate worst case scenarios out of anything I could worry about. And as a mother of young children, what keeps me up nights is the idea of anything bad happening to my children.
Some times, many times, my own work disturbs me. The Santa Claus story was especially unnerving at parts, just like writing The Waning (which fortunately had no children involved). Yet while the fact that these ideas are in my head and the act of extracting them is alarming at times, I almost always feel better to have them out on the page.
My most recent story experience, writing about the monster after the newborn, was extremely cathartic for me. I have had that idea floating around my head, haunting my subconscious since my daughter (now 6 years old) was a newborn. It continually resurfaced and nagged me, especially when my son was then a newborn. But now it is out of me. Though the story is not finalized, submitted, or accepted anywhere (yet), it is still a relief to have it on the page.
Another new theme has emerged in my style since submitting to so many horror anthologies. Historically, I always prefer to ground myself in “real” horror, in that it is not supernatural or creature horror. I like to use the real (currently understood) world as my stage and showcase the horrors that already exist there. People are the monsters.
Yet, with these recent shorts, I feel myself veering hard into creature horror. Supernatural monsters and all the things I usually try to avoid. And, even more surprising, I think it is working really well. My childhood of Goosebumps and Stephen King books is permeating my themes. My history is showing.
Maybe I was just limiting myself all along but confining myself to the real. I do not shy away from brutal, disturbing themes and premises. Why should I avoid supernatural or creatures? Especially when it is working.
This might be a change, an evolution in my writing. I will have to see what comes out of me next, where the next project takes me.
Fiery Pen 