How to Write Scary Novels Infused With Fun and Humor
A few years ago I was a bridesmaid at my best friend’s wedding. She rented out a beautiful, remote house up in the hills of Temecula, California. On the eve of the ceremony, the bride and us bridesmaids were staying at the house, and just as the sun set over the distant Pacific, the power went out. We abruptly found ourselves in total darkness.
(6 Tips for Writing Domestic Horror.)
We panicked. Cell reception was spotty, and so we struggled to figure out what was going on. We knew it wasn’t a widespread outage because we could see off in the hills that other houses still had their lights on, their faraway glow adding to our confusion, our distress.
“This is a horror movie,” one of us said, I can’t remember who. We started to joke about who would die first (this I remember, because they all said me). We found comfort in humor. And as we huddled around holding battery-operated tea light candles meant for the reception, we went on joking about potential monsters and murderers, until we were no longer afraid.
Shortly after this incident, I started writing my debut novel The Return, which was about a group of friends who take a weekend trip after one of them returns from a mysterious two-year disappearance. The friends joke around, have fun together, because of course they do. They’re friends on a vacation. They don’t know they’re in a horror story.
Horror is a broad genre, and there are many ways to craft a work of horror fiction. Every writer will have their own approach and it’s important to find and be true to your own voice. What I love so much about writing horror is that the stakes are high, often life and death. But for a reader to really feel the gravity of those stakes, they need to be invested in the characters and genuinely care about what happens to them.
Creating dynamic, grounded, relatable characters is pivotal because if a reader only sees a character in mortal peril—battling monsters or ghosts or murderers, running and screaming and hiding in the worst possible places—it may be difficult for that reader to relate to the character or care about their fate. If a reader gets to be with that character in moments of levity, connect with them there, see them as a whole person rather than just a victim, then later, when that character is in danger, the reader won’t just be afraid for them, but afraid alongside them.
(Rachel Harrison: Separating the Pressure of Writing From the Joy of Writing.)
For me, the horror that works best doesn’t solely stew in the grim. It sets the scene, introduces us to the characters, makes us invest in their wellbeing, shows them laughing and joking and having a good time, being normal people unaware of their impending doom…and then plunges them into darkness. Take, for example, my friend’s wedding.
If it were a horror novel, the bridal party would arrive at the house, you’d get to know all of them, be endeared to them, or at least understand them. You’d laugh when the starving, stranded bridesmaids realized the only food in the house was a packet of unsalted almonds, laugh when they started rationing the nuts, laugh when they tried to bribe a pizza chain that refused to deliver to their remote location.
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Everyone knows what it’s like to be hungry, so as a reader, you’d be able to relate. You’d be closer to them. So close, that as you realize the bad thing is coming, the dread makes you itch. So close, you might feel as though you’re in the house, too. And then the lights go out.
Now it’s dark. It wouldn’t be an instant massacre because that’d be a pretty short and anticlimactic story. That means time needs to pass between each misfortune, and again, your characters don’t know they’re in a horror story. At least, not yet. Maybe they’re afraid, but they won’t fully understand the danger they’re in. So, the power’s out. The bridesmaids joke about being in a horror movie, who will die first. The bride is running around yelling “save the cheese!” more worried about the lack of refrigeration for her cheese wheel wedding cake than potential power-cutting murderers.
When the second misfortune comes, the bride disappearing, would the bridesmaids assume it’s a monster? No, they’d assume the bride was hiding trying to scare them, or something else easily explained. They’d continue to goof around until the third misfortune. Until they see the blood. To infuse fun and humor into horror is to ground it in reality, which in turn raises the stakes for the reader. How devastating would it be for the “save the cheese” bride to get macheted the night before her wedding?
Grounding your characters, your setting, dialogue, everything in reality except perhaps the horror itself will intensify the scares. Scaring a reader isn’t just about crafting the threat, it’s just as important to craft everything around it. To weave levity into horror fiction is to simply ask, “What if this happened in real life? What if this happened to me?”
If that night in the beautiful house up in the hills of Southern California, if real danger lurked there in the dark, only I didn’t know it yet, I would have been joking around with my friends, fake pouting about being dubbed first to die, defiantly declaring myself a final girl, until the dagger came down and shut me up for good.
How about you?