Authors Electric

It was a dark and stormy night when I sat down to write this blog post. I hoped that it might help to inspire me, but several hours later I still hadn’t got the foggiest idea and was still racking my brains for something to write about. As we all know, the only good cliché is a dead cliché and I had really hoped to avoid trotting out the same old trite and hackneyed phrases about the same old topics, but to be honest, new and original insights are my Achilles’ heel: what I’m good at is putting a new spin on things, at finding a different angle, rather than generating something genuinely innovative … The thunder outside had finally stopped and it was now raining cats and dogs, but I was still no closer to my goal: for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything and it looked as though I was going to have to pull an all-nighter to get my post written on time. But you live and learn, and in a flash I suddenly realised that the solution to my dilemma had been staring me in the fa...

Sometimes I feel like I don’t quite belong to the horror writing crowd. Sure, I call my work ‘horror’ because it’s the most convenient label for it (‘Speculative fiction’ is a bit of an umbrella term and does tend to get me looks of slight derision) but ‘horror’ is very broad. Almost too broad, as anyone attempting to compare say, H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James and Dean Koontz against one another might find. Any slasher-movie fans reading my work would probably be quite disappointed - there’s no blood, or guts, or… well, horror , really. So I struggle to define it. Then I came across the term ‘fridge horror’. It’s from the marvellous TV Tropes website , where I can spend hours poring over the often hilarious descriptions of character, plot and genre tropes that can be applied to all stories - written or televised - everywhere. It’s kind of nice. It reminds you that, far from it just being you as an author who keeps coming up with ideas that have already been done, there are no new id...

          So, at the risk of touching upon an emotive and controversial Die's forthcoming book subject for my first Authors Electric post, I really need to talk about the treatment of women in horror (not to mention writing in general). This is a huge topic. I’m not even scratching the surface here.           Horror is no place for women.           Of course I’m saying that as an ‘outrageous opening statement’, similar to the recent and excellent New Statesman article ‘ I hate strong female characters ’. But I do mean it a little. Why any woman would want to bother writing in the horror genre considering the pernicious, outmoded sexism that’s rife in it is beyond me.           Every genre writer I’m sure is aware that (and I don’t want to blanket here, there are good examples out there; this is just ba...