Guest Post: Michael Aronovitz on Horror

This guest post comes from Michael Aronovitz, a friend and colleague who specializes in writing horror. Here he reflects on the nature of horror and what it is that attracts him to the genre. Though my fiction rarely moves outside the literary realm, I have always admired and respected those authors who could tell stories through conventions while at the same time finding ways to subvert them. Michael, I believe, is one of those rare talents. I hope that in the future I can find other genre masters who can provide the clarity and insight I cannot.  

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 I am often asked why I write horror fiction, and my answer is that it’s complicated. In terms of fundamentals, I believe that all fiction is based on at least some measure of horror and darkness, as stories without impending perils don’t publish. Consider the super-criminal holding a .32 Beretta to the head of a powerful C.E.O’s best friend sitting next to him, after killing the guy’s head broker two chairs down and saying, “What’s the code? Or do I keep shooting until I get to someone you care about?” (Action/Crime).  Is there all that much intrinsic, baseboard difference when Cinderella has to leave by 12:00 or her dress turns to rags, leaving in heavy sub-text that “home” equals familial abuse (Fairy Tale), or that Anastasia Steele considers signing a contract with her new boyfriend, permitting him to go beyond “vanilla sex” and abuse her in his sick little spank-chamber (Romance/Erotica), or that some serial killer in the suburbs of Ohio is “skinning his humps” (Thriller)? Each piece of fiction that inevitably sells contains something in the story-action with a measure of consequence, through which a character must ask the question, “If I don’t do this, I must prepare for something to happen that will hurt me, or make me feel bad, or affect a loved one, or cause harm or death.  Therefore, in order to prevent ‘this’ I must do ‘that.’”

If I don’t ask her to the prom by the end of 4th period, she’ll wind up going with Biff.

If I don’t clamp down more on my 16 year old daughter’s latest habits of staying out late with that monster of a boyfriend, she’ll end up beaten and pregnant.

If I don’t marry soon, I’ll wind up an old maid.

If you call the police, I will kill a school teacher in Westville.  If you do not call the police, I will kill an elderly librarian in Jackson County.

I do not see such heavy contrast. That being said, I do believe that there is a schlock label affixed to horror, because we immediately associate with it the old fashioned archetypes: zombie, werewolf, water beast, mummy, witch, warlock, and vampire, those so familiar (and parodied) that they ring of “comic book” and youth and fourteen year olds listening to heavy metal, painting their nails black. There is also the paradoxical stigma that if a horror story doesn’t scare the reader, it has failed in some way, yet if it does frighten the reader it is gimmick-oriented.  Aside from the clear argument we would make against the former issue, recognizing the popularity of cable television horror like True Blood, The Walking Dead, and Penny Dreadful, I would argue that first, horror no more has to scare a reader or viewer than good comedy is meant to have us slap our knees and guffaw out loud. And it is not any sort of “gimmick” that attracts most horror readers. Pay-offs are cheap if they depend on splatter, and most horror writers would attest to the fact that their foreshadowing and character oriented epiphanies are far more important than blood flow.

Of course, violence-exposed is a part of the genre, and I will be the first to admit that I have a stable of physicians I communicate with when I need to find out how much blood will spray in what manner in a variety circumstances. I suppose the point is that a good romance doesn’t make us turn the page because the five paragraphs of graphic erotica in chapter 19 were well delivered. We all (or most of us at least) know how the moving parts work. The work sold because there was something at stake and we believed the characters enough to visualize them. And while we are on the subject, it is not the raw humping and pumping that sells even the fuck scenes. It is the story around them and the discomfort leading up and during that entices us, the teasing, the uncertainty, the misconceptions, the foreplay. Same with good horror. The killer car in Christine by Stephen King is not finally the point, hell, it’s not even important. It is the slow destruction of the child in Arnie Cunningham (and what grows in its place) that hooks us.

On a more personal level, I am often mystified by some reactions to my own fiction. I often have “non-horror” people jerk away from it, often like old fogies at a P.T.A. meeting, trying to discuss whether or not a well written piece of pornography is in fact, well written. On the other side of things, many critics of horror say that I’m not really a horror writer. Why?  Because I don’t write “horror.” My favorite “horror” writers don’t write it either. They write “fiction.” There is a rise to climax where a protagonist of some kind has his or her face-off with an antagonist. The ending could be all sunshine and roses, but if anything, horror endings are often untethered.

So I write tragedy.

So happy endings read odd to me.

So I slow down and look at car accidents.

In the end, I will inevitably put a book down no matter what “genre” is tacked to it, if the thing begins with “It was a day like any other day,” or “Josie was bored.” She was? Well, so am I. If that makes me a horror guy, it makes me a horror guy. I appreciate peril. I suppose the biggest difference is that in the scenario where “Melvin” wants to ask “Barbie” to the prom before “Biff Malibu” beats him to the punch, I am far more interested if Melvin goes to the maintenance closet where he’s hidden a dozen roses, and there’s a ghoul waiting for him behind the mops and floor polishers.

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Michael Aronovitz published his first collection titled Seven Deadly Pleasures through Hippocampus Press in 2009. His first novel, Alice Walks, came out in a hardcover edition by Centipede Press in 2013, and Dark Renaissance Books published the paperback version in 2014.  Aronovitz’s second collection, The Voices in Our Heads, was published by Horrified Press in 2014, and The Witch of the Wood came out through Hippocampus Press in early 2015. Aronovitz’s first young adult novel, Becky’s Kiss, will be appearing through Vinspire Press in the fall of 2015 and his third hard-core adult horror novel titled Phantom Effect will be published by Night Shade Books in the fall of 2015. Michael Aronovitz is a college professor of English and lives with his wife and son in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania.

For more information about Michael and his work, check out his blog.


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