Home Is Where The Horror Is
I saw some discourse earlier this week implying that horror authors who set their novels in small towns somehow aren’t writing “real” horror, or at least, aren’t writing anything that matters. The assumption being that writers from urban or metropolitan centers, or writers who set their horror in such centers, somehow inherently know Horror better because they experience it more in those settings. And I’m sorry, but that sort of gatekeeping, literati, purist, bourgeois bullshit doesn’t fly with me.
(And I’m angry that I’ve had to type ‘bourgeois’, a word I don’t think I've ever used in writing before now, because it’s a stupid word, and half the people who use it are doing so incorrectly and half the people who read the word won’t quite know what it means, and you shouldn’t have to Google or search a dictionary in the midst of enjoying a book or article).
But I digress.
Horror settings change, over the history of the genre. There was a period where the crumbling gothic castles and moors were replaced with suburbia and small towns. But there have always been horror stories set in big cities — from the Weird Tales era up through Skipp & Spector and through today.
Writers write what they know, and Horror writers write what they know of horror, and to insist that because a writer lives in a big city, they somehow have a more intimate understanding of horror than someone in a small town is ludicrous. The best, most effective horror is always an examination of the human condition — the creation of empathy within the reader. After all, if your audience doesn’t care about the characters, then they won’t care when the Horror besieges those characters.
Columbia, Pennsylvania — where Vortex is located — is a small town, with a population of 10,000 people as per the last official census. This past year has seen a rise in gang violence, drug abuse and addiction, homelessness, food insecurity, rapes, robberies, assaults, grand theft, arson, and all the other things that are not specific to a metropolitan area. And towns smaller than Columbia are visited by these same Horrors every day. Meth isn’t just ravaging urban neighborhoods. It’s ravaging small Appalachian mountain towns. Sexual assault isn’t something that only happens in some dark New York City alleyway. It happens behind closed doors in suburban Iowa. Homelessness isn’t just a problem in Los Angeles or Chicago or Baltimore. It’s a problem in Allentown and Louisville and Nacogdoches. Masked men supposedly employed by I.C.E. are scooping farm and orchard workers in rural counties as well as in cities. The eradication of our laws, Constitution, and Bill of Rights — an erosion that has been underway for several decades but is now kicked into overdrive — impacts all Americans, regardless of where they live, or what kinds of Horror they have personally experienced in their lives.
Horror, as a genre, can take place anywhere people are, because horror is an emotion felt by all living things. To disregard or disagree with that is to be fundamentally wrong, and to insist upon it and wield your certainty like a cudgel against your fellow writers is a dick move.
Set your stories in a place you know how to write about, and populate them with people you know how to write about. Imbue them with hopes and fears that are true, and they will appeal to everyone.