The month of October is lovely for a host of reasons. You can pick your favorite thing about October and insert it here!
I like it for many reasons, too, but I also like it for the opportunity to get to talk about horror novels. I’ve had many such opportunities this month, and I’ll hook you up with links to great places to read about horror before this post is over.
AND as a result of all the horror talk, by this point in the month I’m also familiar with the nose-wrinkled, puzzled look of someone who does not understand why anyone would enjoy horror. AND that’s fine because we all like reading different things. Horror isn’t for everyone, and I am 100% on record as saying that horror movies, especially slashers and jump horror, are not for me. So, I get it. I also recognize that there are a lot of horror writers I admire who pull heavily from horror movie tropes, so if horror movies didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have access to the horror novels I enjoy (looking at you, Stephen Graham Jones).
At the end of the day, for me, horror (and other forms of speculative fiction) is about answering big existential questions in a safe way. Before I proceed, I’m going to warn you that the paragraph you are currently reading is about to drift into a not-too-graphic description of deer (yes multiple) dying in my yard. If that’s not your jam, use this as a content warning. You should be able to pick up the post just fine in the next few paragraphs (look for the heading below to know when to come back in).
OK, so over the time I’ve lived in Ashland I have found a single dead deer in my yard on two separate occasions (technically my dog discovered them, but I wasn’t too far behind because in a dog’s life a dead deer in their yard is a BIG deal that involves A LOT of barking). The first time, the best I can tell, a deer just keeled over and died. It was weird and unsettling because I had no idea how.
In a horror novel, that death would turn out to be the epicenter of some sort of huge pandemic. In a horror novel it might be that the deer walked over an unmarked grave and had his life sucked out of him so the occupant of the grave could reanimate.
There are so many horror-y reasons that deer might have died…though I suspect she just hit the end of her life and shuffled off this mortal coil…while in my yard. Did this situation freak me out a little? Yes, it did.
Fast forward to last week when my dog once again alerted me to a disturbance in the yard that once again proved to be a dead deer. But this time – THIS TIME – that deer had some bites taken out of it. Friends, there were entrails involved. The word ‘evisceration’ might be excessive, but it’s also technically accurate. It was a much grosser experience. I also was in no question about how the deer came to be dead. The ‘in my yard’ part though…that was horrifying too. Because now – NOW – I know that there is a critter, likely a big cat, somewhere not too far away. It may even be there now because the body isn’t at all rigor mortis-y, and, while not warm, per se, the death was relatively recent. So when that happens, as it turns out, you end up looking around, and then up into trees (inasmuch as you are able to contemplate while managing a very agitated dog) and wonder if you are really as alone in your yard as you thought you were only a few minutes prior.
It is eerie…also gross. It is HORROR. But less enjoyable than the kind of horror you can enjoy safely from your couch. Way fewer big cats indoors! But not NO big cats, remember this story?
(We are done with the dead deer discussion now)
If you opted out due to the content warning, welcome back. The point here is there are all kinds of horror. Sometimes it’s gross. Sometimes it’s psychologically terrifying. Sometimes it’s both. But experiencing those feelings in a way that doesn’t require dealing with actual corpses is optimal. Because for me, horror is about the bigger existential questions of “why” asked by all the best literature…with a little added glimmer of dark weirdness that appeals to my inner goth teen. You don’t have to take my word for it, there is a new book called Why I Love Horror that features essays from a bunch of horror authors.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to talk about these things in a couple of venues throughout the month of October…and a couple of them are ones that you can access from your computer as recordings.
I spent some time talking to a camera about recent horror as a part of our monthly Read This! segment. You can see more here at Read This! We do these monthly, so there are more segments if horror isn’t your thing!
JCLS also has a monthly segment with Jefferson Exchange called JXReads. Our October installment featured me and fellow blogger Brystan talking about why we love horror. You can check that out here…and keep an eye out. We are skipping November, but we’ll be back in the studio on December 9 talking about the best books of the year!
But if listening to folks talk about horror fiction isn’t so much your thing, and you’d like to just read some already, here is a list of some of the best recent horror suggested by all the horror readers here at JCLS.
Happy reading.
Wait…did you hear something? Like a really soft tapping at your window?
Probably just my imagination.