My horror fiction and my crime fiction have always shared a common trait in that they feature ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but another trait separates them. My crime fiction in most cases focuses on people who’ve courted danger. My horror fiction usually features people who’ve done nothing to invite calamity into their lives. They’re just merely victims of circumstance. Which I suppose is a little mean of me. So why go there? I suppose I don’t like Hollywood endings. Whether we like it or not, life is unfair and cruel at times. So, it’s not realistic that innocent people escape evil. The good guy doesn’t always win and the bad guy doesn’t always get his comeuppance. Every day the news proves this point again and again. In my own life, I’ve witnessed bad things happen to good people and it would be disingenuous for me not to reflect that in a story.
You could be mistaken for thinking I’m a dour and depressed personality type. Maybe I am, especially if I don’t get my coffee. 🙂 But I’m not. Not really. I have a belief that we can overcome anything, especially when we are faced with insurmountable odds. That’s what my horror fiction is all about. Dark and seemingly impossible forces can strike us at any time, but how we cope, endure and conquer those forces. It’s those people who are ripped from their world and put on the spot fascinate me. How a character deals with a traumatic event or their worst fears is exciting because those people will grow from the experience and ensuring they’ll never be the same person again. Some of those characters will triumph and some will buckle and fail. And in either case survival is never guaranteed, even for those that triumph. The dark side is cruel like that. 🙂
This concludes DRAGGED INTO DARKNESS’ month in the spotlight. I hope you’ve enjoyed these essays and stories. September is another book, but I’ll leave you with one of the stories from the collection—ACCEPTABLE LOSSES. It’s probably one of my most requested stories and really highlights what DRAGGED INTO DARKNESS theme means to me. Captain John Clelland has struck the worst of bargains for the lives of allied soldiers. You can either read the story or listen to an audio adaptation of the tale here.
Thanks for reading.
