EUGEN BACON, AUTHOR OF CLAIMING T-MO AND WRITING SPECULATIVE FICTION ON WRITING HORROR AND THE PARANORMAL PART 2

Writing horror and the paranormal part 2 by Eugen Bacon, author of Claiming T-Mo and Writing Speculative Fiction
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Eugen Bacon loves chocolate, sake, Toni Morrison and Ray Bradbury. She has sold many stories and articles, together with anthologies. Her stories have won, been shortlisted and commended in international awards, including the Bridport Prize, L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest and Copyright Agency Prize. Recent publications: Writing Speculative Fiction, Macmillan (2019). Claiming T-Mo, Meerkat Press (2019). In 2020: A Pining, Meerkat Press. Black Moon, IFWG. Inside the Dreaming, Newcon Press. 
 
Writing horror and the paranormal
 
Horror
 
I was seven or eight and it was night. I was sprawled on a coach in the living room with my mother. She must have forgotten I was there, or perhaps she thought I was asleep. She was watching TV, a British horror I Don’t Want to be Born, sometimes titled Sharon’s Baby, starring Joan Collins, Eileen Atkins and Ralph Bates.
 
The drownings, the stabbings, the hangings, the decapitations. They stayed with me, that trail of death surrounding a sinister infant whose evil refused to give in to exorcism. My child mind augmented the horror, the parallels of a cooing baby with fat legs in a pram and the spate of unusual deaths.
 
Weeks after, my life sat on pause in that terrible world. I crept about holding out a crucifix and scattering holy water—my mother was a devout Catholic so there were plenty of these. I observed babies with a wary eye and could not close an eye without lights on. It took years for me to disremember the uncanniness around the possessed baby, the effect of a curse after a woman rebuffed a dwarf. I still remember the fear—it was as real as touch. Shadows with heartbeats lurking under my bed.
 
What I experienced from watching this paranormal horror was fear, revulsion and spook, and it contained all three types of terror King posted about on Facebook to his over 16,000 followers, and me:
 
The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worst one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …
That is what a good horror story does to you.
 
Paranormal
 
Revisit the terror you felt as a child when you visited a theme park: how the tiniest hairs at the nape of your neck stood as you stepped into the circus of screams. Remember how, as you trod or rode in a cart along the darkened trail, there was a presence: a wisp of breath, a feather-light touch, a whisper in the shadows, a silhouette inside fog, a flicker of nights, a howl of laughter … How you barely breathed until a burst of light summoned you back to fresh air.
 
Stories continue to evolve around the Bermuda triangle that has inexplicably vanished so many people, planes, ships. Paranormal stories contain a supernatural element, for instance an atmosphere, an entity, a poltergeist. Cinematic examples include director Hideo Nakata’s psychology horror The Ring (Ringu in Japanese), where the ghost of a seer’s daughter murders within seven days anyone who watches a mysterious video tape; Andrew Douglas’ The Amityville Horror, where demonic forces terrorize newlyweds in an abandoned house; and James Wan’s The Conjuring, where paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine seek to resolve a dark force terrorizing a family in a remote farmhouse. A classic paranormal tale is Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, many times adapted into a film or television drama, a ghost story that transforms the miser Mr Scrooge.
 
Commonalities in these narratives are isolation, the uncanny—the strong element in the paranormal.
 
This is a great start to writing startling horror and the paranormal.
 
*First published in Eugen Bacon’s Writing Speculative Fiction, Macmillan (2019)

REad part one by clicking here 

Writing Speculative Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches (Approaches to Writing) by Eugen Bacon

​In this engaging and accessible guide, Eugen Bacon explores writing speculative fiction as a creative practice, drawing from her own work, and the work of other writers and theorists, to interrogate its various subgenres. Through analysis of writers such as Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, this book scrutinises the characteristics of speculative fiction, considers the potential of writing cross genre and covers the challenges of targeting young adults. It connects critical and cultural theories to the practice of creative writing, examining how they might apply to the process of writing speculative fiction. Both practical and critical in its evaluative gaze, it also looks at e-publishing as a promising publishing medium for speculative fiction.
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This is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Creative Writing, looking to develop a critical awareness of, and practical skills for, the writing of speculative fiction. It is also a valuable resource for creators, commentators and consumers of contemporary speculative fiction.

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