Christopher Golden's Love for Horror

Dear Reader,

Let's talk about Horror. With a capital "H." Famed author Douglas E. Winter has said that horror is not a genre, but an emotion. I could not agree more. Further, novelist Robert R. McCammon once said that the beauty of horror was that you could write any kind of story--science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, western--and have it be a horror story. So I have a small secret to impart to those of you who thought horror had died a decade ago.

Not only is it back . . . it never left.

I was conceived, or so my mother likes to tell me, on Halloween night, 1966. Perhaps that's merely a myth she enjoys perpetuating, but I have to wonder. One of my earliest memories is of being moved to tears by the movie FRANKENSTEIN. As a child, nothing caught my interest so much as a good scary story. Ghosts, ghouls, goblins, things that go bump in the night, they inspired me the way nothing else ever has. I love books and comics, movies and television, but all my life, my favorite entertainment has always been the stuff that scared me.

I started to write in earnest while still in high school. Even then, all my stories were creepy, eerie things, about serial killers or ghost trains filled with zombies (true! they still exist!). In college, my mother asked why I never wrote anything "good." I knew what she meant: something in which nothing strange or unnerving happened. I explained that I had written funny stories, science-fiction stories, romantic stories, but somehow, in some way I could not control, somebody always died.

I have waxed philosophical in interviews in the past year or two about WHY I think people like to be afraid. I still believe those things. But for me, as a child, I think there was something much simpler at work as well. The presence of the supernatural, of monsters, suggests that normal people must ever be prepared to rise to the challenge, to combat evil. We must become heroes, in a way, despite the mundane reality of day to day life. There's a grand and wonderful magic in that.

Earlier I noted that horror never went away. That's very true. While much of what I read now is categorized as "fantasy" or "mystery," nearly all of my favorite writers regularly venture into territory I would call horror. Mystery writers like James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane and Carol O'Connell. Fantasy writers like Philip Pullman, Tim Powers, and J.K. Rowling (yes, Harry Potter IS horrific). There's a great deal of horror in their fiction, with all its trappings.

During the eight years and counting I've been a full time writer, I have worked in a number of genres, but everything I have done is informed by, if not the monsters and situations associated with horror, then at least the EMOTION of horror. My recent novel STRANGEWOOD was written as a fantasy novel, yet it is very clearly horrific. My teen mystery series BODY OF EVIDENCE are all weird science thrillers, but they are also very much horror stories.

Horror never went away, you see. It simply went into stealth mode.

And now, according to sales figures and publishing trends, it's coming back. Just in time to catch the wave, I have embarked on a brand new series with Pocket Pulse. PROWLERS is the story of Jack Dwyer, a nineteen year old Boston guy, an orphan who, along with his older sister, owns Bridget's Irish Rose Pub. The Prowlers themselves are a pre-human race of sentient animals who, over time, have developed the ability to appear human, and who live amongst us. They are not werewolves, but they are the things that inspired the myth of werewolves. Like other ancient civilizations, they have been displaced and are almost extinct. Now, some among them have determined to prevent that from happening by taking their rightful place in this world . . . as savage predators, subjugating their prey . . . mankind.

PROWLERS, obviously, has more than its share of monsters. But when Jack's best friend Artie is among the first in the city to die, that is only the beginning of the emotional horror the characters must suffer. Before they can face the flesh and blood monsters, they first have to combat monsters of the heart and mind.

Also at the core of most of my work are affairs of the heart. PROWLERS is no different, as Jack must come to terms with the attraction he feels to his dead best friend's girlfriend . . . even as he receives aid against the Prowlers from Artie's ghost.

Horror never really went away . . . and yet it's back! With PROWLERS, I hope to remind readers why horror is such a universal emotion. Love, mystery, suspense, aching sadness, tales of wonder and fantasy . . . in horror, you can do it all.

I hope you'll come along for the ride.