Why horror?

I don’t write or write about horror fiction. I write thrillers and suspense and non-fiction about everyting from BTS entertainment to health to marketing. But the one thing people ask me about all the time is the horror.

Why do you read that stuff? Why do you write that stuff?

Here’s why.

Isaac Asimov (a great place to start; about as effective as “Webster’s defines ‘horror’ as…”) was asked to pinpoint “The Golden Age of Science Fiction,” and he answered “fourteen.” That may be entirely apocryphal but it’s also true. There is a window in the developing, adolescent brain, a short period of time when…things…can enter, take up residence, and persist for the rest of your life.

For example: comic books in general, and superheroes in particular. If you read them and loved them, for whatever reason, at the age of, what, ten or eleven, some part of you will always love them. You may drift away from that particular genre at sixteen or eighteen or post-college, but you understand and accept those tropes forever, so when the new Marvel movie comes out or you catch an episode of The Boys, you don’t go, “Ew, kid stuff.” You automatically accept the admittedly absurd premise of ectomorphs in stretchy suits shooting beams out of their eyes. If you weren’t properly exposed to that set of beliefs during your personal Golden Age, you might still go see the new Spider-Man, but it’s because you like that particular actor or it’s a momentary distraction, but you are not, by any stretch of the spandex, a fan. I mean, it’s all kind’a silly, right?

Baseball – maybe spectator sports in general – is another subculture like that. So is Dungeons and Dragons. And golf. And the Grateful Dead.

And horror. Horror movies, books, comics, TV shows – the whole multimedia magilla. But this one digs deep – past pop culture, all the way to the territory of dreams. Hence the consistent, apparently permanent, success of Freddy and Jason and vampires and zombies.

But why did horror get its hooks in so deep – so much that sixty years after my first exposure I still write and write about the genre, I did a whole Substack on Stephen King, I watch and read and listen to all its endless variations on virtually a daily basis?

Maybe it was the Golden Age and good, old-fashioned trauma.

I was born in a medium-sized desert suburban town in Southern California, and in the early Sixties, we all lived with a back-of-the-mind awareness, the certainty, that World War Three was just over the horizon. Worse, my little town of Riverside was adjacent to March Air Force Base, one of the Strategic Air Command bases where they kept the big, black nuclear bombers on constant alert, constantly in the air. And maybe because of that, or maybe just because it was America in the Fifties and Sixties, the city would test its air raid sirens at 10:00 am on the first Friday of every month (I don’t know, maybe it was a different day of the week on a different week of the month – it was a long time ago – but it happened, every month for years). This was the signal to duck-and-cover, to tune to the Civil Defense channel on your transistor, to bolt for that one house in the neighborhood you were sure had a secret fallout shelter in the back yard. After all, it made sense. It was going to happen. The Cuban Missile Crisis just made it worse. So did the Bay of Pigs, and. Khrushchev pounding the podium at the UN with his shoe.

Then one day – a summer day, as I recall – a day that wasn’t a Friday and wasn’t 10:00 a.m., and wasn’t the end of the month — the air raid sirens went off all over town. That tri-toned, ululating drone.howl that sounded ike nothing else It wasn’t a squad car or an ambulance or a fire truck. It was the sound of death from above.

It’s a sound that I can still remember, sixty years later.

On that particular day, all the kids were home. And mere moments after the siren began, we all came out of our houses and looked up, into the ceramic-blue desert sky, and waited to see the contrails we knew were coming, the ones we had been dreaming about forever. This is it, we told each other. It’s finally happening. We’re dead.

Three minutes later –a full eternity – our mothers came out into our yards (this was long ago; most Moms were home during the day back then.) They had been listening, too, each and every one of them, but not just to the sirens: to the local radio stations, too

The Civil Defense Authority on the radio had just made the announcement, they old us. It was an error. A mistake. Some nameless municipal functionary had hit the wrong switch and initiated the test at the wrong time on the wrong day. There was nothing happening, they assure us. There were no missiles coming, no bombs on the way. No atomic war.

Not this time.

I was just a boy. I had grown up in the suburbs. I’d run from a few bullies; I’d nearly been hit by a car a couple of times (but who hadn’t, in that era before seat belts and crosswalks?). I’d broken a wrist playing baseball (badly). But I had never been truly afraid, afraid for my life, until that moment. And even when our mothers said it was fine, even when the long, groaning, very-different “All Clear” siren played… we stayed right where we were. We kept staring at the sky. Six minutes, we reminded each other. That’s how long our parents and teachers had told us it would take for the ICBM’s from the Russian silos or subs to find us.

So we waited. Six minutes. Fifteen. A full half hour. Only then, finally, did we tell each other what we hoped was true: “It’s over. We’re safe. Not this time.”

A strange, unique wave of relief passed through me. Not the cool wash after a jump scare; not the deep breath following a barely-missed accident. This was deeper and darker and far more profound.

Not me, I told myself. Not this time. Not yet.

I had been reading everything in sight for years by this point. Absolutely in the middle of my own Golden Age. But now, after the siren, after that feeling, I found myself absorbing horror more than anything – movies, books comics, all of it. A lot of it – then and now – was not very good, I know. But it was still fun, still memorable, even if much of it was like a carnival ride.

And some of it, every now and then, stuck with me – stuck inside me. Night of he Living Dead. Peeping Tom. Psycho. Don’t Look Now. And in later years, Alien, Magic, Serpent and the Rainbow. And of course everything good and bad by Stephen King, in every medium. They dug deep. They scared me in the way I wanted them to, so afterwards – when the credits rolled, when the last page was turned – I would experience a ghost of that same dark wave of relief I felt on that random summer afternoon: Not me. Not this time. Not yet.

Which is why I still watch the stuff, read the stuff, write and write about and perform the stuff. Because I’m still stuck in the Golden Age of Horror, and always will be.