«I ask myself what is forbidden? What can’t I write about? And then I write about it.” – Stephen King
Writing about what is deemed “forbidden” might seem counterintuitive, but considering that King’s thousand pages about a child-eating clown is about to get its third (second-and-a-half?) big screen adaptation, it’s the exact opposite. IT is filled with gruesome descriptions, ranging from heads popping out of fridges (“The losers are still losing, but Stanley Uris is finally ahead.”) to deadbeat and abusive parents.
So if this does not affect a man such as King, what does?
The answer; Pet Sematary. It is the one novel King locked away in a drawer, never intending to publish it. I, for one, am glad his wife managed to talk him out of it, as it has become one of my favourite horror stories, despite that you can second guess the entire plot halfway through. After all, King was never one for subtle foreshadowing.
As King describes in the introduction to his novel, Pet Sematary is largely based around his house during the year he teached at University of Maine. While idyllic, “That road has used up a lot of animals,” his neighbour had said, just like the road that features so heavily in the novel. And, as you might guess, the title did not come from Mr. King’s vivid imagination; it came from how the local children had misspelt “cemetery”.[1]
“Pet Sematary is the one I put away in a drawer, thinking I had finally gone too far.”
And I’m inclined to agree. As I’ve mentioned previously, the novel simply reaches a point about halfway to two thirds through where it’s possible to second guess the rest of the story and hit bulls-eye nine out of ten times; but still it made me shiver even as I was taking a slightly too hot bath.
In terms of my own fear, since I have few irrational ones (assignment deadlines nothwithstanding, and even that being a ‘rationale’ one), I feel like I might be out of my depth. How am I supposed to write scary stuff when I don’t know what scares me?
But horror can be more than a genre, it can be a genuine fear unrelated to what’s put onto the paper itself. I dread the creative piece I need to hand it at some point, because I have a feeling it simply won’t be scary. But if that’s because I’m terrible at the horror genre or a terrible writer in general I couldn’t tell.
Even if I by some stroke of luck should manage to procure something remotely decent within the genre, I suspect it will be either more related to the black comedy-esque Embarassement of Dead Grandmothers or it will fall flat at the punchline, just as did The Family Car.
Sucks to be me, I guess.
[1] Stephen King, Pet Sematary, Doubleday, November 1983, p. 4-7
Bibliography
Golden, Brady, ‘The Family Car’, New Fears, Titan Books, September 2017
Lotz, Sarah, ‘The Embarassement of Dead Grandmothers’,
New Fears, Titan Books, September 2017
King, Stephen, IT, Hodder and Stoughton, 1986
King, Stephen, Pet Sematary, Doubleday, November 1983
Wisker, Gina, Horror Fiction: An Introduction, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005
Pinch of Horror 