Entries from The Fountain Pen tagged with 'Horror'
What I Like in Horror
I made a personal discovery last night: I finally know what it is I like about H.P. Lovecraft's stories, and by extension what I like in the horror genre. For a long time I have been trying to figure out...
Atmosphere in Weird Fiction
Lovecraft once said, "Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction." I'll go one step further and state: good weird fiction (and good horror fiction) lives or dies by its atmosphere. I've given this much thought over the...
To Emulate or Not to Emulate Lovecraft
I'm in a bit of a quandary and I'm a bit discouraged and bummed out. It's no secret that I enjoy H. P. Lovecraft's stories; his stories scratch and itch of mine like no other author has. We tend...
Commonplace Monsters
Sometimes a quote says it best: "One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special...
Reading Doesn't Produce Fright
I was recently talking with a friend of mine and each of us confessed we have never been scared by a book, and in truth feel no contents of any book will ever instill even a remote sense of...
Trite Horror Icons
I will say nothing new here, nevertheless I will say it. Our standard pantheon of horror monster figures have become too familiar to be frightening. Vampires are all too prevalent, zombies abound everywhere (they even march around in broad...
Dark Powered Villains
What if there were some ancient dark power, some supernatural evil from the mists of time? What if people could make a contract with it, tap into it, or otherwise use it? What if they use their newfound power...
Supernatural Prerequisites
After finishing Supernatural Horror in Literature something became quite apparent to me: horror tales work because of a belief in the supernatural. It seems to me ghost stories, haunted houses, and things that go bump in the night carry...
Writing Horror
Supernatural Horror in Literature/Introduction - Wikisource: The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces...
To Define or Not To Define
Over at The Lotus Lyceum is a short article titled "How much backdrop is too much?" which simply states that stories which do not explain all the mysteries are more appealing than those that explain away all the background...
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