I love this quotation for so many reasons. It's typical of King's direct and self-aware style, it highlights the accepted notion of "pride" not being associated with genre fiction, and it provides an excellent entryway for understanding the key elements (as I see them) of popular horror fiction: the gross-out, horror and terror.

When we talk about the gross-out, it's worth thinking about it in terms of the physical reaction or revulsion that you, as a horror writer, attempt to engender in your reader: moments where the reader is positioned to identify with pain, or scenes of close focus on "unclean" body emissions. There seems to be a reductive impulse working in the gross-out - a move to see the body as frail, base, even filthy, to reduce the noble human to the animalistic creature that we have all forgotten we are.

Horror is more to do with transgressing moral or "natural" boundaries. Monsters are horrifying because they are supernatural; dismemberment of a sympathetic character (which I always feel should happen at least once every ten or so chapters) is horrifying because it's morally outrageous. Most of all, horror is spectacle - you position your reader to observe, to focus, to recoil, to have nightmares. Horror is out in the open, too fascinating to be turned away from: it seduces the reader into guiltily watching as the boundaries that we put so much faith in are violated.

However, we can forget about boundaries all together when we talk about terror. Terror is in the moments when we realise there are no boundaries, when the systems of logic and thought that we have depended upon to structure our lives are shown to be not only erroneous, but perhaps non-existent. This is the good stuff. Don't treat readers gently - remind them they are going to die one day, they are going to lose loved ones, they are going to wither and grow old. Remind them that humankind is all alone in the universe and we have no idea why, that meaning slips out of our reach in the very moments that we attempt to grasp it, that there are things beyond our comprehension lurking in corners and in the forgotten spaces of our minds, and at any moment these things might erupt and pitch us into chaos and madness: we might forget how to speak or mean, we might become completely undone. Not the stuff of nightmares, but the stuff that will keep the reader awake at night. That's terror, and the writer of genre horror should strive for it at every possibility.

Genre fiction, contrary to what hacks and intellectual snobs may tell you, is not easy to write. I have a feeling that horror fiction, like romance fiction, is one of the target genres for cynics who think they can make a fortune by carelessly slapping together some generic elements. But it's not enough to put blood, vampires, hacksaws, superglue and a passing nod to existential dread on the page and expect these elements to be scary in themselves. The horror writer must animate these elements with unsettling moments of displacement, with protagonists who are real, with prose that is rich and detailed. Go to dark places, but go there with reverence.

(© Kim Wilkins 1998)