Lamplighter

Why I write Horror

By C.S. Humble

Inside of every person there is a wellspring. A secret place where the truth of us resides. The place where the heart and mind and spirit are distilled, and eddied, all three transforming to a single, beautiful source. Every person has it. It is one of the foundational elements composing the geological cross section of the inalienable and undeniable dignity suffusing every human heart.

I believe that. As firmly as I believe in anything.

I believe that is the place where writers go in order to find their stories. Where all our characters sleep, waiting to be rescued. Sleeping, while dreaming to be unearthed and drawn into the sunlight. Pulled into worlds crafted by storytellers desperate to build imaginary kingdoms connected by yellow-brick roads that will only ever exist inside a reader’s mind. Worlds of great and indeterminable mystery painted in sultry white and black and smoky gray of Noir. Into the great, nameless forests so wide and so vast and so hidden that entire civilizations have been born, surged to power, and vanished beneath the soil without their language ever needing a word for ‘foreigner’.

The fantasy. The romance. The thriller. The mystery. The unknown.

All these places and ten-thousand places more, each a genre.

And each and every one has Horror.

Kingdoms have their dragons. Noir thrillers their slighted lovers angling for revenge and stiffed, vengeful mob bosses decked as kings in their three-piece suits. And all manner of subtle and deceitful predators wait in the green dark of unknowable wild. Horror is there. Always.

Since the beginning.

Forever from the moment we first stepped the Earth.

Horror reaches from the primordial bedrock of our race, weaving itself through our timeline, stretching out of our present vision all the way to the indeterminate and invisible precipice that signifies our complete and total erasure. Beginning to end. Memorial or immemorial, horror is timeless. Its darkness persists against every virtue, save love itself. Horror has a strange power to diminish all that is best in us because it delivers us unto fear.

Readers know that, I think. With its monsters, human and inhuman, and its dark carnivals and killer beasts natural and unnatural and supernatural, Horror evicts love from our hearts and inescapably threatens all we hold dear. Family, home, life, and for many, afterlife. With its desolating power, the horror in our real, waking lives casts an almost impenetrable shroud over all the prospect around us. Stealing from our site the vision of community, security, and joy.

We are, all of us, living in that persistent shadow. Our children are massacred at American schools. Our pale blue dot is slowly losing its winters, becoming hotter and redder every year. And the political landscape seems frozen in phase, an eclipse casting us in the perpetual gloom from the light of a black star.

All this terror, all this indifference. All this trauma, all this darkness.

So many of us are in that place, unable to see. Afraid.

I don’t write horror because I enjoy the residing in the dark.

I write horror because I am a lamplighter, and the only place a lamp is useful is in the dark.

Every storyteller, in some way, is providing that little bloom of light for those willing to look for it – to read. Because every reader is just a person who wants to see something worth believing in, a candle in the night. And in order to see anything in this all-night-forever world of ours the lamps and candles and lanterns of horror writers willing to traverse that shadow realm will forever remain essential to our persistence as a storytelling species.

Writers of horror prove to be the willing, necessary explorers of chthonic realms, gloomy haunted castles, and blood-soaked basements hidden by the veneer of pleasant suburbia. They tell us stories that chill the blood, remind us of the animal living inside us, and the monster that animal can become. Horror shows us who we are. What we are.

The best of Horror, the very best of all literature in my opinion, shows us who we can be. What we can be when we dig down past that primordial rock of ages, down through the near impenetrable stone of our circumstances and our trauma, punching through to find the wellspring inside.

A single story can do that for a person. Especially a horror story.

And once a person finds the wellspring inside themselves, that precious humanity, it is impossible not to see it in each and every person we meet, allowing us to endure all that mankind has so far failed to bear.  

My stories are about exploring those dark places, through the gloom, by the light of a single storyteller lamp, hopefully strong enough to reveal all the strange glory inside each person willing to go with me.