For a dozen-odd years, I didn’t really talk about my love of horror in polite company. The genre has something of a PR problem, being popularly associated with slasher gore, head-spinning exorcisms, and an uncomfortably narrow demographic of fans. Perhaps because I’d internalized these views, I explored the genre through online fan spaces instead, only to be disappointed with shallow discourses preoccupied with serial killers’ quirks, victims’ poor decision-making, and whether a given franchise is “scary enough.”
It wasn’t until I got serious about writing fiction that I realized the main draw of horror for me, atmosphere aside, is the way these stories put disempowered characters into high-stakes situations and force them to find agency—or else. It’s this focus on perilous power dynamics that elevates horror and can elevate our own writing if we’re willing to learn from it.
Rest assured, writers who are feeling squeamish don’t have to grit their teeth through a Stephen King novel to learn these lessons. Introspective stories with slow-burning tension have existed alongside the sociopathic and the supernatural as far back as gothic classics like Jane Eyre and Poe’s works. And contemporary horror is undergoing a renaissance as authors from marginalized backgrounds share incisive perspectives on fear, including diaspora authors here in Canada such as Ai Jiang, Suzan Palumbo, and Lindsay Wong.
Two pieces are illustrative here: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s late-19th century feminist touchstone “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the 2023 novelette Linghun by Ai Jiang. Jane in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a new mother confined to a country estate as a “rest cure” for her postpartum depression. Wenqi in Linghun is a high-schooler whose mother spirals downward in unhealed grief as she lives, by choice, with the ghost of Wenqi’s brother. Notably, neither protagonist is threatened with the likes of murder or spiritual possession. (The most violent episode in Linghun involves a brawl among housing applicants in a grim satire of metro Toronto’s real estate market.) Instead, the stories’ oppressive atmospheres are rooted in disempowerment, as readers see in Jane’s gendered mistreatment and Wenqi’s emotional labour in service of family obligations. Suspense builds as readers come to realize how the protagonists are imprisoned in their own dysfunctional relationships; their struggles to escape their situations test their character growth as much as anything else—and double as incisive social commentary. Regular readers of gothic horror know that protagonists often risk succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome or a psychological break, a death-of-self with the same narrative gravity as a conventional murder.
In a compelling story, the challenge characters are up against doesn’t have to be larger than life, but it has to be larger than themselves if readers are to take the stakes seriously. Writers who worry that their protagonist’s success comes too easily can take a cue from horror by reconsidering whether their lead is sufficiently vulnerable. And if the stakes don’t feel particularly dire, leaning into protagonists’ anxieties can produce tension and emotional resonance—no need to artificially inject action into the plot. If we writers can set aside our genre stereotypes and pick up a horror novel or two from the library, we can better understand how to tell visceral stories that are grounded in real-world issues and not merely scary.
This article was originally published in the 2024 Volume II issue of WordWorks.