I had an interesting challenge posed to me recently, and by recently, I mean near the beginning of the year. An author friend challenged me to write a horror book, or, if not pure horror, a book with horror elements in my standard genre. In exchange, he was going to add sci-fi elements to one of his books, just to see how it went.

I tried. I really did, but I can’t do it, and it’s not why you might think. So let’s talk about it below the fold.

I am not a fan of the horror genre necessarily, at least not how a lot of people are fans. It’s not because I don’t like it because I’ve been reading and watching horror and horror adjacent things for a very long time, here and there. Some of my favorite movies of all time are horror. It’s not because I haven’t been exposed because I have, but because absolutely nothing scares me, I find it very hard to identify with horror. When I say nothing scares me, I mean nothing at all. Nothing in the standard fictional realm of entertainment. Movies, books, games, none of it affects me one bit.

I was a big Stephen King fan, back in the old days, but never because his books were scary, but because they were interesting reads. I’ve read Lovecraft and Clive Barker and Dean Koontz. In fact, Koontz wrote about the street that I grew up on in one of his novels. I’ve even met him on a couple of occasions.

However, none of his books have ever scared me. I just don’t react that way. I don’t suspend my disbelief easily. I can get invested in a good story, but I never lose my place in the real world. There might be a monster, but I never take it seriously, beyond my enjoyment of the prose in the moment.

So I’ve been down a rabbit hole for a number of months now, trying to understand how the whole genre works. That means watching a ton of movies that I don’t find scary, reading a bunch of books that I haven’t been necessarily impressed with, at least for fulfilling my goal and playing, and replaying, games that haven’t caused me to flinch at one bit. I’ve been going over lists of the scariest books or movies or games and sorry, it just doesn’t affect me. I replayed Alien: Isolation. Fun game, not scary. I re-watched The Exorcist. Zero reaction, except to note that it’s still a good movie. I watched Rosemary’s Baby, since I have the movie on my shelves and not the book. I still like the movie, it just didn’t phase me. I’ve read Poe, which I haven’t done for a very long time. Not scary. I was recommended Last Days by Adam Neville. Good book, just not scary. I’m working my way through some Koontz at the moment, specifically Phantoms, which is supposed to be his scariest. I don’t remember if I read that before, I might have but it wasn’t on my shelves. Good stuff, not scary at all.

I don’t honestly know how to be scared. I can’t identify with it. That makes it damn hard to write it in a convincing way.

I’ve written plenty of potentially scary things in my career. I’ve done zombies and aliens and monsters and I’ve even been kicking around an idea for a realistic take on vampires that I might write one of these days. However, none of it was actually designed to scare the reader. I don’t get how that works.

That’s not to say that those stories might not have been scary to the right audience, but I am not the right audience to be the judge. That sent me into a deep dive on what people find scary and frankly, I just don’t recognize any of it. I know it’s all special effects and there’s nothing dangerous about a book or movie. I’ve seen enough in my life where I’m just not bothered by anything. Gunshot wounds, traffic accidents, dead bodies, I’ve seen it all. It’s what happens when you do things to physical bodies. I saw someone hit by a car at about 60mph and my reaction was “ragdoll physics is real!” That doesn’t scare me. I don’t want it happening to me, but I’m not scared of it. Body horror does nothing for me. Good effect, maybe, but that’s all it is. An effect. I also don’t go to movies to get grossed out so that’s not an attraction either. Gore is just gross, not scary. Mostly it just bores me.

A lot of this, I know, comes from my age. I’m just not scared of anything anymore but I never really was. The only thing I remember from my childhood was that after watching a movie, I have no idea what it was, but I didn’t want to poke my toes out from beneath the covers lest someone bite them off. That was decades ago. Someone mentioned in a post on Reddit that by the time you’re my age, you should only be scared of bankruptcy and death, but I’ve got more money than I know what to do with and I’m not remotely afraid of death. It’s just not me.

Therefore, when I sat down to actually try to scare people, I didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin. Sure, I could go with cheap jump scares or gore, but that’s just boring. If I can’t feel what I want my audience to feel, then they’re probably not  going to react.

I write with a specific audience in mind and those people read the same kind of things that I do, they enjoy the same style of story that I do. I can write what I want to write because I write what I want to read. Horror just doesn’t do it for me and I’d have to assume that it doesn’t do it for them either.

In fact, as this has gone on, for quite some time in fact, I asked on my mailing list what people thought and they pretty much agreed with me. What scares them? Nothing. Do they want to read horror? Mostly no. That’s not to say I can’t add monsters into my books. In fact, I’m re-reading a series I wrote so that I can expand on it and there are plenty of “horror elements” that show up for a chapter or two and then go away. Ooh! Scary monster! Kill it and move on to something else. Ooh! Spooky situation! Get past it and back to what we’re here to read! I honestly don’t know how I’m going to address this challenge, but I’ve got time. It’s a lot easier to throw sci-fi into horror than it is to throw horror meaningfully into sci-fi. Sure, you can look at movies like Alien and Event Horizon, but I’d argue that those are horror movies with sci-fi trappings than the other way around and that’s not what I write. That’s not what my readers want to read. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments because I’m still at a loss.