Casting Shadows Over Hearts
AUTHOR: Joyce Ellen Armond

As you carve your pumpkins and costume your kids this month, indulge me in a little exploration of my favorite genre juxtaposition: romance and horror.

What the heck is horror, anyway?

Okay, before we get started I want you to twist off your head, turn it upside down and shake out all the images of masked killers stalking nubile teens through lovers lanes. If you as an individual author want to marry the slash-and-hack subgenre with romance, be my guest. However, you won?t find help for it here. So if ?horror? isn?t Jason and Freddy and Michael Myers, what is it?

For our purposes, let?s define horror by where it aims. Science fiction aims at the head, inviting intellect and imagination to take a trip into a world of future technology. Fantasy aims at our sense of wonder, leading us into worlds that we wish could be real. Horror aims at our most primitive emotion: fear. The founding father of modern horror, H. P. Lovecraft, says it best. ?The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tales as a literary form.?

So, with knife-wielding maniacs, helpless heroines, evil twins, backwoods preachers and all other horror clich?s firmly put aside, we can construct a working definition of romantic horror: characters finding love in situations that evoke fear of the unknown. As author Richard Spurling so evocatively puts it, ?To be horrified is to feel the foundations of your humanity move in a manner that disturbs your security in, not who you are, but what you are.? In some of the genre?s best stories, authors like Laurel K. Hamilton and Susan Squires so effectively have their characters face the question: am I the kind of person who can love a monster? And readers eagerly turn pages to find the answer.

How To Horrify

If you want to scare your reader, you can always write the literary equivalent of a plastic skeleton jumping out of the darkness of a haunted house ride. But after they close the covers of the book, readers won?t remember that. They won?t be moved by that. They won?t be thinking about it for days afterwards. So what are some techniques that we as cross-genre romance writers can steal from masterpieces of horror?

Lovecraft tells us that the key to horror is breaking the laws of consensual reality. ?A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible concept of the human brain ? a malign and particular suspension or defeat of the fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguards against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.?

I don?t remember much of the movie Halloween (which as the original slasher movie can claim horror status, in my opinion), except for that moment when, out of focus and over Jamie Curtis? shoulder, Michael Meyers sits back up when everything I know about the rules of life says he should stay motionless, defeated and dead. When you have the reader trapped deeply in your fictive dream, and you pull one of the basic rugs of life out from under her feet, that?s good horror. However, you have to get the reader to suspend disbelief before that can happen. That?s why the second most important ingredient in horror, besides the element of weird, is lots of reality along with it.

Author Mort Castle reminds horror writers, and now romantic horror writers, that, ?When the ordinary is invaded by the terrifyingly extraordinary, horror happens.? That?s why in romantic horror, character and setting must be drawn as realistically as possible. If you want your readers to believe in, and be horrified by, your masked murderer who doesn?t die, they first have to completely believe in your heroine, your hero, the street they live on, the taste of their coffee, the frost on their windowshield in the morning and how they?re going to be late for work because they have to scrape it off, how there?s a run in her pantyhose or pit stains on his white shirt ? all the details of their literary world must ring absolutely true, so that when you introduce the discordant note of the supernatural, it rings true by association. Stephen King is a master of creating a world that, if taken from the pages, could translate without hitch into reality. Except, of course, for the evil clown living in the sewers. When you read the premise of IT ? evil clown living in the sewers ? you tend to laugh. Pshaw. How unbelievable. Evil clown, indeed. But King pulls his readers into the alternate reality of his story by making the characters and their secrets so real, and the town and the sewer underneath so believable, that when the evil clown comes along, the reader believes in that, too. As Mr. Castle says, ?It?s reality?s ?what is,? not imagination?s ?what if?? that can transform horror premise into horror story.

Finally, good horror needs great suspense. Shock is cheap and easy. Suspense takes hard work and careful crafting. The romantic horror writer must not only break the rule of reality in a fictive world that is otherwise indistinguishable from the real one, but also, Spurling tells us, prep the reader for the revelation. As romance authors, we have in our toolbox the ability to craft sexual tension. We use a glance between hero and heroine, an inadvertent brushing of thigh against hip, a stolen kiss, to work up to sexual fulfillment. Apply the same techniques to create horrific tension. Let the weirdness start slowly. Make the fabric of reality thin and waver a bit before you tear it completely. As horror expert Paula Guran points out, ?Horror elicits a physical response as well as an emotional one -- and that response is similar to sexual arousal: your pulse races, your breath quickens, your eyes dilate, perhaps you shudder, gasp, and moan.? Think of suspense as just another way to make your reader shudder, gasp and moan.

Spurling provides one last piece of advice about endings. A good horror story, he suggests, leaves enough questions that the imagination can wrestle with what-ifs for days. ?A good ending leaves the conscious satisfied but provides the imagination with a puzzle to play with even after leaving the author?s fictional realm.? Applying that technique might be the difference between a good book, that a reader enjoys, and a great book, that a reader can?t forget. That follows her around for days, compelling her to tell all friends, co-workers and acquaintances about this book they must run out and buy and read, right now!

The Sticky Parts

And here?s the subject matter that will generate angry letters from all sides ? what?s too much, what?s taboo, where is it okay for an author to go, and where should she stop for the sake of propriety. The ultimate ruler is, of course, what the publishers will buy. But in a creative discussion about blending horror and romance, I think we should discuss the sticky parts. Our emotions run deepest when love, sex and fear are evoked. As authors, we have a responsibility to play fairly when we light these kinds of fires in our readers.

When a critical eye is cast over modern horror, a certain negative attitude about sex is all too evident. Unmarried teens who have sex in cars always die. As a great literary example, in Whitley Streiber?s novel The Forbidden Zone, people willingly go to their deaths at the hands of invading aliens because the aliens offer death by The Best Orgasm Ever. But the classical roots of horror were all about challenging conventional beliefs about sexuality. The mother of the vampire romance, Bram Stoker?s Dracula, featured female characters who, at the bidding of darkness incarnate, had orgasms and liked em ? quite the no-no for repressive Victorian standards, when the female orgasm was thought of in non-sexual, clinical terms only, and women complaining of nervous hysteria were given vibrators instead of Xanax. As modern romance writers, I think we have a healthier standard of sexuality than many modern horror writers and for that reason we are better qualified to ask questions like what would it be like to love a monster.

I think that the cornerstone of romantic horror is the premise that romantic love, complete with expressed sexuality, is the best weapon we have to defeat evil. Paula Guran believes that ?the deeper, transformative aspects of sex are still taboo? in horror fiction, and in Western culture. When a heroine accepts the vampire?s kiss, she?s transported out of humanity. Even when she willingly bares her neck to her vampire lover, she?s stepping outside of cultural norms and transforming our definition of what love and sex can be. I suppose the cynical path is open, and our monstrous heroes can be dismissed as just the ultimate ?change the bad boy? fantasy. But I prefer the more romantic, and more introspective, perspective. Horror stories, from The Brothers Grimm to The Ring II, ultimately are about how we deal with Lovecraft?s ?weirdly horrible? situations that challenge our understanding of consensual reality. Fiction has pitted maternal love, fraternal love, love of country and love of deity against those challenges. It is the task of romantic horror to convince readers that romantic ? and erotic ? love is the best answer to fear. And to me, that?s one of the most moral message we can send.