Writing creepy stuff.

I saw an interview with Stephen King once where the interviewer kept implying that King must be really warped to write such stuff.  And he'd joked and laughed it off.

I thought that the implication was pretty stupid.  Of course you could write horror if you were normal.  It's just stories, you know.  Doesn't mean King wants to turn into a werewolf or something.

Like Fairytales, horror speaks to us on many levels.

But most of all, as I keep saying, a story is a story.  You try to write about characters you care about, and have a story arc which is satisfying and interesting.  Doesn't mean if you write mysteries that you want to kill someone.

Or that you would personally want any of the creepy things that happen in horror to really happen.

Funnily enough, it isn't the supernatural horror that is disturbing to me when I write it.  Its the behavior of the humans.

For instance, the abusive boyfriend in Death of an Immortal was the real villain of the piece, not the vampires.  The warped sociopathic kid in Rule of Vampire.  The kidnapper in Blood of Gold.  All worse in some ways than the vampires.

In Ghostlander, I'm writing about crimes that are so horrid that they create Hauntings.

So I have things happening to people that are disturbing.  The actual Hauntings, as creepy as I try to make them, are in no way as disturbing as the actual crime.  They only work as something worse when they recall and amplify the original crime.

Still, for the first time, I wonder what is in me that can write these scenes.  Mostly what I've read and seen in the movies, embellished by my own imaginations.  Fortunately, nothing I've experienced myself.

Really, I'm not that weird.

Later:  I finished the chapter that started out so creepily and it ended with an emotional payoff.  Forgiveness and redemption.  Which was only possible because of the original bad stuff.

So it goes.