More on Christian Horror

I've already touched on this subject, here and here. But Mike Duran, who's a Christian horror writer whose first book is coming out soon, has more on the subject:

Likewise, the “dread” invoked by the Christian writer is dissimilar to that of the atheist. Scripture warns, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). This “fear” is pivotal to “Christian horror.” Whereas the atheist author invokes the fear of the absence of God, the Christian invokes the fear of the presence of God. The “horror” is in His existence, not His non-existence. Of course, this “horror” is for those who deny Him, ignore His warnings, and refuse His mercy. Sadly, terror awaits those on the “wrong side” of the Universe.
...
Perhaps there is no greater horror than that of an atheistic worldview. Forget blood, gore, and ghoulies. A world without meaning and purpose is the ultimate horror. A universe that arose by chance, exists without meaning, where lives plummet toward annihilation is the worst kind of horror. The child huddled in bed, fixated upon the dark closet, becomes the adult gaping into the void of what, he believes, is a godless universe. And unlike the Christian novelist, the atheist author has nothing but more “dark closets” to offer their readers.

It's an interesting post, but there are some things I'd quibble with. For example, the argument that only those who "deny Him, ignore His warnings, and refuse His mercy" have any reason to fear God. The Bible's account makes it clear that anyone who meets God feels dread. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 1:7) We tend to whitewash this, to say what the Bible really means is respect. The word, though, also means terror. And terror is probably a better description of what people feel when they meet God, or even an angel, than respect, in the Biblical accounts.

Why is that? What is scary about God? It's not that he is capricious or abusive. It's that he's unfathomable. Completely beyond our ken, and because we don't understand him, yet are completely under his power, we fear him. What's more, we realize that we are unworthy of him. We are fallen and sinful creatures, who by all rights should be the subject of his wrath. Thus fear is the natural and right response--it simply acknowledges the truth about who he is and who we are. That is why fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Now if I only knew how to capture this in a story...

Now accepting submissions for the next Storyblogging Carnival

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the one hundred and twelfth. It will be our sixth anniversary, and I'll host it here, at Back of the Envelope. The carnival will go up on Monday, September 6th. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, September 4th. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

Writing Sanctuaries

The other day, Instapundit linked to this article on Man Caves at The Art of Manliness. A "man cave" is defined as "an area within a house frequented by a man, as a workshop, garage, basement, or den." It's really a sanctuary, where a man goes to be alone and do what he enjoys doing, whether it be tinkering, playing guitar, or writing. It's supposedly a play on "caveman," but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of Batcave (the name of Batman's hidden base) in the etymology.

The man caves in the article include a number of writer's studies, including Ernest Hemingway's, Frederick Douglass's, and, my favorite, Mark Twain's. It got me thinking about my own man cave. My room in my apartment serves as bedroom, work area, and writing studio. It's spacious, if nothing else, but hardly orderly:

This is just one corner, but it tells you most of what you need to know about me. There's an air conditioner, because I live on the third floor and it can get pretty hot, and the curtain is pulled closed over that window. There are the boxes that I haven't gotten around to after a month of living here, and the bookshelf containing just the books I felt that I most needed to unpack. The higher shelf contains books that I've either started reading or plan to soon, while the lower shelf contains the writing reference books I thought that I needed right away. The remaining shelves are filled with junk. Next to the shelves are some filing drawers, containing important papers in the top drawer, and printouts of stories with revision notes from my writing group and myself in the lower drawer. The bed, which is unmade, is set on a frame that was in the apartment when I arrived. Atop it is an inflatable mattress, because I'm too cheap to buy a real one.






This side of the room is where I do all my work. There's my computer and my business class color laser printer. Most importantly is my comfortable desk chair, an absolute necessity considering the number of hours I spend in front of that computer a day. There's a fan nearby, and bottles meant for recycling on the shelf above. Beside them is a black case with my tools. And on the floor is another box I haven't gotten around to unpacking.

Somehow, I doubt I'll be making anyone jealous of my man cave.

UPDATE: Fixed the links, which had somehow gone missing.

Storyblogging Carnival CXI

Welcome to the 111th Storyblogging Carnival. Enjoy the stories.

---

Not So Clean Limerick
by Madelein Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Humor Blog
An under 100 word word brief story rated PG.

The tale of a bachelor who hates to clean, told in a two-verse limerick.

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Spot the Differences
by Mohit Salgaonkar of Still Waiting to Wake
An 539 word short story rated PG.

In a photo album of an old trip, I noticed picture of a person who never was on the trip! Bizarre? Creepy? Read on!

---

The Disciple
by Terry Haferkamp of Shadow Dwellers
A 2,400 word short story rated PG.

Supernatural / horror. Police question a young writer about his connection to a series of gruesome murders.

---

Cyberteapunk
by Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium
A 5,080 word short story rated PG-13.

A tale of the future of the tea party movement (20 years). Cyborgs, anarchists and neo-luddites with a touch of humor.

---

This concludes the one hundred and eleventh Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

UPDATE: Wow, the Storyblogging Carnival got an Instalanche. It'd be nice if we'd had a few more entries for this one, but hey, I'll take what I can get. See here for more carnivals. You may notice that it's slightly out of order--that's because I've been moving old carnivals over from my old blog, and I haven't put them all in order yet.

FURTHER UPDATE: I'm now accepting entries for the next carnival, our sixth anniversary version. The details are here.

Laptop hunting

My laptop has been dying a long, slow death. My monitor's been acting up for a while now, freezing the lower part of the screen until I tapped it. A couple days ago, it acquired wavy black lines that won't go away. So I figure it's time to either repair my laptop or get a new one, and I'm leaning in the "get a new one" direction. The reason is that the laptop is out of warranty, and repairing it will require replacing the monitor. I can't imagine it costing less than a few hundred dollars, and I can buy a new netbook for that much.

Therefore I've been looking at netbooks. They generally run in the $300-350 range, and are small. They don't have great screen resolution or speed, but they make up for it in low weight and long battery life. Since I primarily want it for writing (and web browsing), that should be fine. I particularly like the Dell Inspiron 11z. I've looked at the reviews, and they almost universally say not to buy it, because the touchpad is unusable. Fortunately, Dell got the message and replaced the touchpad a couple of months ago, but I haven't seen many reviews done on it since then (customer reviews on the new touchpad are generally positive, though).

At $350 the cost is reasonable. Unfortunately, $350 is for the very basic model, and it'll probably end up costing more than that.

I've been trying to figure out what I really need and what I can do without.

First, there's the non-negotiables:

• Windows 7 ($30 for upgrade) - The default is Windows Vista, and I'm unwilling to inflict that on myself. All the reviews say that Windows 7 is better in every way, so I'll shell out extra for it.
• External DVD drive ($65 separate) - As it doesn't come with an internal drive, this is necessary if I want to install any of my old software on it.

So it's already $100 extra. Still reasonable, however.

Then there's the definitely want:

• Processor upgrade ($75 for upgrade) - According to all the reviews, this makes a definite difference. It certainly sounds worthwhile, and it's the sort of thing that's not easily changed later.
  
• 6-cell battery ($35 for upgrade) - This I'm a bit more hesitant on. I want the battery life, but this apparently sticks out a bit and makes it heavier. However, longer battery life helps it to fulfill my main objective--a portable computer for writing.
  

And finally the cheap nice-to-haves:

• WiFi n card ($25 for upgrade) - Not that I have an 802.11n network, but it'd be nice to be able to use them.
• Internal bluetooth ($20) - This one would be nice to have, but I can do without.

So if you add that all together, it comes to closer to $600 than $350. I'm still trying to convince myself that that I don't need the processor and/or the battery.

UPDATE: And... I've changed my mind. This review convinced me that the M101z is a better choice. It has a more expensive base price, but many of the features I was willing to pay extra for, so the total price is lower.

Cirque du Soleil

Kristin and I went with some of her friends to see Cirque du Soleil. I'm sure you're familiar with it... it's a circus that's well known for its spectacles. Bizarre costumes, a narrative, very artsy. It was my first Cirque du Soleil performance. And the thing you realize is that, although it's very artsy, it is indeed a circus. There are no animals, but there are jugglers, acrobats, a tight-rope walker, and even clowns. In fact, the clowns are the driving force behind the narrative, which is actually pretty slim. The show I saw is called Ovo, and it has a very vague narrative about insects (each performer played an insect), a stolen egg, and a love story between two bugs. But the story was really just an excuse to set up various performances.

Despite my lack of excitement about the insect story, I was very impressed with the performances. There was some very good juggling, and the high wire and the trapeze act were both very good. One thing I noticed is that the performers occasionally slipped up. One of the trapeze artists fell into the net, and the jugglers occasionally dropped what they were supposed to be juggling. But each time they simply started again as if nothing had happened, which I think was exactly right. Considering the very fancy things they were doing, perfection's pretty much impossible, and recovering from mistakes well is important. I'm sure there's a life lesson in there somewhere, but I'm equally sure that it's a hoary cliche, so I'll just leave it alone.

Overall, it was worth seeing.

A writer pick-me-up

If you're ever feeling bad about your own writing, you should listen to this podcast with Brandon Sanderson. In it, you'll hear just a few sentences from the first novel Brandon ever wrote, back in 1994. For some unknown reason it remains unpublished. Well, technically speaking, it's pretty obvious why it's unpublished. While Brandon is now a well-known and well-respected writer who was asked to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, in 1994 he was just an amateur, and it shows. What this demonstrates is that even good writers start out pretty bad. The difference between a good writer and the bad writer he began as is time and practice. And if he can do it, so can you.

Update: And thanks to Mike Barker's transcript, here are the first few sentences from Brandon's novel:

The wind blew carelessly and freely. It caressed the stark dunes with its whispering touch, catching fine grains of sand between incorporeal fingers and bearing them forth like hundreds of tiny charioteers. The sand, bone white in color as if it had been bleached by the sun's harsh stare, seemed to shine for a second with a sharp inner light. Then it dulled in color to a deep black.

And as you can see, Brandon's come a long way.

Now accepting submissions for the next Storyblogging Carnival

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the one hundred and eleventh. It will be hosted here, at Back of the Envelope, and going up on Monday, August 9th. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, August 7th. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

Salem

As Kristin mentioned elsewhere, I recently attended a Writer's convention called Readercon. One of the panels I attended was about horror and New England. New England is a popular setting for horror stories, for a multitude of reasons. The reason I bring it up was that the topic of Salem was raised. Salem, Massachusetts has turned itself into something like a theme park of witches. One of the people on the panel, a Wiccan, in expressing how she felt about that, said that it was like how a Jew would feel about a theme park called Auschwitzland.

There are a couple of problems with this analogy. The first is that approximately 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz, while 0 Wiccans died at the Salem Witch Trials. All 24 people killed by the trials were Christians. And therein lies my biggest pet peeve. Witchcraft, as practiced in the Wicca religion, is a very different thing than what the Massachusetts colonialists considered witchcraft. Casting it as persecution of a religion that didn't exist then misses the point, and Wiccans have come pretty late to the game in order to claim that that they have sole authority to define what witchcraft means.

Witchcraft, by the definition used by the colonialists, involved making a deal with the Devil for power and using that power to torment and kill others. I believe that C.S. Lewis was the one who pointed out that if we truly believed that such a thing existed, we would agree that those who practiced it should be brought to justice, and thus our main disagreement with the people of Salem is simply that we no longer believe in witchcraft. Personally, I prefer a somewhat more balanced view, that is agnostic to the existence of witchcraft. I believe that the Salem Witch Trials were a grave miscarriage of justice and a failure of due process, convicting people on hearsay and superstition.

So what do I think of Salem? Well, comparing it to Auschwitz is silly. But so is its attempt to make witches into some kind of mascot. Because the mascot witch is yet another definition of witchcraft, very different from both the colonialist and Wiccan one, a caricature with none of the religious connotations of either. To pretend that it has anything to do with what happened in Salem over 300 years ago is an injustice.

Cooking and Writing

Kristin has a couple of posts up that folks might enjoy reading. The first, "The 10 Habits of Highly Irritating Editors,"are 10 items that editors do all the time, but shouldn't.

The second talks some about my cooking travails.

It's all good stuff, and well worth reading.

Fact and fiction

This is beautiful:

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Personally, my favorite part is this:

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

The point, of course, is the old adage, "Truth is stranger than fiction." Or more to the point, "Truth is less believable than fiction." It reminds me of a scene in one of the stories my girlfriend wrote. In it, the protagonist, an unpublished writer trying to get some words on paper in a New York coffee shop, is accosted by a tourist couple who are excited to meet a "real New York writer." Upon reading that, I shook my head and told her that the scene would never fly. It's too cute, the couple is too touristy, it's just not believable. Her response was that the exact thing had happened to her once in New York Halifax. I recommended that she cut it anyway. Truth just doesn't cut it when you're trying to write believable fiction.

Anyway, she's since sold the story (though I don't know whether the scene made it or not, as I haven't seen the final version).

Update: In the comments, Kristin corrects me that the real life events happened in Halifax, not New York. Which doesn't exactly do much to make it more believable.

Storyblogging Carnival CX

Welcome to the 110th Storyblogging Carnival. Enjoy the stories.

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The Signal from Space
by Terry Haferkamp of Shadow Dwellers
A 330 word brief story rated PG.

A signal is misinterpreted. This is a science fiction story written from a prompt with a surprising twist.

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Feeling the Breeze: Dreadless
by conditional cognition of conditional cognition
An 963 word brief story rated PG.

A tale of my experiences and people's perceptions of me during the 9 years I had dreadlocks, from DC to the OC.

---

Happily Ever
by Pietro of Engrossing Tales
A 1,384 word short story rated PG-13.

This is a love story of a different sort. They say love lasts forever, even beyond the grave... but what kind?

---

Believe in yourself! Baby 80 and 81!
by Harmonyloft of 100 Baby Challenge
A 2,927 word short story rated PG.

Cadence Sierra's wish is to have a huge family in Sims 3. She decides to take on a 100 baby challenge. Will she ever succeed?

---

Project हो तो ऐसा (बिलकुल न हो)
by Mohit Salgaonkar of Still Waiting to Wake
An 4,294 word short story rated PG-13.

Read the hilarious narration of how a crazy project in Mumbai University was (almost not) completed!

---

This concludes the one hundred and tenth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Now accepting entries for the next Storyblogging Carnival

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the one hundred and tenth. It will be hosted here, at Back of the Envelope, and going up on Monday, July 5th. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, July 3rd. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

What is Christian horror?

Old Post: My earlier post addressed the question of "What is horror?"

Since I've already addressed the question of what is horror, the next question is "What is Christian horror?" To answer that, I first have to answer the question, "What is Christian fiction?" This is a topic I've addressed before, but I'll do so again here. There are several possible answers:

1. It's written by a Christian.
2. It's written for a Christian audience.
3. It incorporates a Christian worldview.

Now, I left out some variants, such as "presenting the gospel message," but while that would definitely make something Christian, I don't believe that it's a necessary condition. And what I'm looking for is what is necessary for something to be considered a Christian work of fiction. Often what we mean by Christian fiction is something that incorporates all three: it's written by Christians, for Christians, about Christian things. Can horror do that? Well horror can definitely be written by Christians, and there are Christians that read horror, so I suppose 1 and 2 are possible. Is three? Notice that I said that it incorporates a Christian worldview--not that it advocates it. It needs to acknowledge and address the Christian worldview, not necessarily preach it.

And herein, I believe, lies the essence of Christian horror. It lies in challenging the Christian worldview. Or more specifically, in challenging the safe, conventional beliefs of the Christian worldview which very often have weak theological foundations. It means asking the hard questions and rejecting the easy answers. You see, Christians believe all sorts of scary things. We believe in demons--dark supernatural powers who wish us harm. We believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. We believe in a God who does not shy away from judgment. And we tell ourselves that we are safe from these things. God loves us and saves us and protects us. And yet... why are we so certain? Anyone who's read the Bible knows that for every passage that offers reassurance, there's another that challenges and condemns us. Writing Christian horror is not Biblical exegesis. It is not the writer's job to explain why the world is not safe, why Christians still suffer and die, why not everyone is saved. It is his job to show that these things are so.

For the Christian, the universe is not meaningless. There is a God, and he has a purpose. But that purpose is unfathomable to us--too deep for us to fully understand in this lifetime (and there aren't any promises for the next). It is bigger than us, vast and unmeasurable, but it is aware of us. We are caught up in it whether we want to be or not.

This is rich material for the writer to mine, and the inability to write horror when you have this to work with is more a failure of imagination than anything else.

New Post: More on the subject here.

What is horror?

On her blog, Kristin, who's just finished Coach's Midnight Diner: The Back from the Dead Edition, asks whether there's such a thing as Christian horror:

One thing that the anthology got me thinking about is whether there can even be such a thing as Christian horror. I’m not talking about the window dressing of horror, the zombies and demons and serial killers and such. What I mean is that many critics seem to be arguing that one of the essential features of horror fiction is, at its core, a sense that everything is meaningless. That there’s no underlying purpose to our lives, or to life in general; or if there is, then the mind behind that purpose (if there is such a mind) does not wish us well. Most Christians would agree, I think, that this worldview is antithetical to the essential doctrines of Christianity.

I realize that Coach’s Midnight Diner doesn’t limit itself to horror fiction. But having read the anthology didn’t do much to convince me that there is such a thing as Christian horror. Most of the best stories were neither horror, nor particularly Christian (I don’t mean that they were anti-Christian, just that Christianity wasn’t relevant to the story). Some were one, but not the other. Even stories with horrific or frightening elements often ended on too much of a redemptive note to seem true to the grim and hopeless horror aesthetic.

I think one of the reasons I especially liked “Flowers for Shelly”, though, is that it did a better job than any of the other stories at walking the line between Christian faith (the first person narrator who turns into a zombie is a devout Christian, and of course there’s the question of how God could allow a zombie apocalypse to happen to good people), and grim hopelessness (perhaps there’s a purpose, but the zombified protagonist isn’t going to find out what it is). It’s also a bleakly funny story.

The problem I have with this definition of horror, that everything is meaningless, is that it's simply not true for all, or even most, horror stories. Stephen King and Dean Koontz, two of the most popular horror writers, do not write stories set in a meaningless universe (Koontz should be self-evident, but read King's Dark Tower series for evidence of how he thinks). Nor is it true for classics of the genre, such as Frankenstein or Dracula. So if it's not true of the classics or the popular modern fiction, I think said critics are defining horror too narrowly. Horror is more than Lovecraft and his successors.

As a Christian and sometime horror writer myself, I have a somewhat different definition of horror, which I know I've expounded on in this blog, but I think it was lost in the transition. Horror should disturb us, not just scare us. It should undercut our assumptions, challenge our beliefs, question our certainties about the universe, and make us feel a little less safe. Notice that meaninglessness can be a part of this, but it's neither the beginning nor the end. In fact, I think meaninglessness can defeat the purpose of horror, leading to a kind of apathy. If nothing matters, why get so worked up about it? Once you decide that the universe is meaningless, what's the big deal about zombies or vampires or one more meaningless thing out to destroy meaningless you? The only reason that meaninglessness is horrifying to us is because we do have hope in a purpose, because it challenges and makes us question that hope. If it ever completely succeeds, it loses its power. So I think horror is most effective when it leaves us an out, when it allows for the possibility of hope, when it can challenge without completely destroying.

Notice that I focused on meaning, but my definition allows for attacks on other foundations of our universe. Our sense of safety and security, for instance. Our faith in God, reality, ourselves, or each other. Horror frightens us because it makes us less sure, and there are myriad ways it can do so. Those who think horror is only about meaninglessness are writing themselves into a box, and I invite them to see what they can do if they explore what else horror can do.

Tell, don't show

A recent critique of one of my stories in my writer's group got me thinking. "Show don't tell" is a mantra of writing instructors everywhere. It's also overly simplistic. When writers choose whether to narrate or dramatize, they have to keep more than "show don't tell" in mind, because there really are places where you need to tell. For example:

1. When it's boring. This is the first and foremost reason to tell rather than show. Sometimes what happens next in the story just isn't that interesting. Let's say your main character drives to the airport. You can say, "Roger drove to the airport." Or you can say, "Roger picked up his keys from the hutch on his way out the door. The ground was still damp from the afternoon's rain, and water clung to his shoes as he hurried through the grass. He pressed the key fob to unlock the door, listening for the audible click before pulling open the wet handle. He wiped his now damp hand on his khakis, and ducked into the car, cold droplets of water landing on his head." You get the picture. At this rate it'll take fifty pages to get to the stupid airport, and during all that time not a darn thing of any import to the story will happen. Which brings us to number 2...
2. When it causes the story to drag. This is a subtle distinction from 1. Usually when something drags, it's because it's boring. But even when what happens is interesting to show, it can still interfere with the pace of the story, and fail to contribute meaningfully to it.
   
3. When it's too long. Yeah, it doesn't seem very artistic to narrate just to keep the word count down. But don't fool yourself: word count always matters. Even when no one tells you what your word limit is, it still affects whether the story you're writing is a short story, a novella, a novel, a trilogy, an endless series... Whether someone will read it depends at least partly on how well you can manage your length.
4. When it's tangential. Not every plot point needs to be shown in detail. Some of the side stories can be relevant to the plot, but aren't worth dramatizing. This is especially true when it's the side characters whose role would be dramatized.
5. When giving the big picture. When you're talking about events that happen over days or weeks or even longer, or when you're describing events happening throughout a town or even a country, it's often most effective to step back and narrate. There are other techniques: vignettes, dialogue. Sometimes these work, and sometimes they're just contrived. Select the one that works best, but don't discount narration.
   
6. When it's painful. All right, here's one you have to be careful with. You don't want to shy away from difficult topics. If your story needs sex and violence, then by all means put it in there. But when you describe sex and violence in detail, then it changes the nature of your story. Be careful about doing that. If it's painful for your reader, he may just put the book down. And sometimes, simply saying what happened is more effective than wallowing in the details. Subtlety and understatement can get the point across where it most matters, in the reader's imagination, far more effectively than a clumsily written scene, or even a well-written one that turns the reader's stomach.

Now hopefully that's not just my way of justifying my own story.

Storyblogging CIX

And this time I delayed a month. On the bright side, it looks like it worked--I had plenty of stories after waiting. Here is this month's Storyblogging Carnival.

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Glittering Void
by Robert Lew Terrell of The Reflected Moon
An 11 word brief story rated PG.

A haiku.

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Miserly Limerick
by Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Humor Blog
A under 100 word brief story rated PG.

A tale of a miser in limerick form.

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First Impressions Matter
by Stephen Kavita of Self Improvement Tips
A 295 word brief story rated G.

His friend sits down on the dark oily wooden benches inside the dusty, unclean hotel and comfortably orders for a burger and a mug of tea. He calmly asked his friend, “Ah…my friend, is…is this the best hotel in Nairobi?” His friend answers confidently, “Well it is definitely the cheapest in town.” He then took his smartly dressed friend to ...

[I tend not to include stories on marketing web sites, which this admittedly is. You have to scroll down to get to the story. Once you do, though, it is a story, so I included it. -DSC]

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Weekend Special
by Lovelyn of Nebulous Mooch
A 336 word brief story rated PG-13.

A car accident.

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Cracks in my Heart
by Jean of Cherry Vomit | My Life in Tansition
A 530 word brief story rated PG.

A break-up.

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Resolving Things Like Gentlemen
by Walter of Henry's Trashcan
A 834 word short story rated PG.

Two men are locked in a dungeon and hold a talent show to see who gets to eat a dead rat.

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The Grandfather I Never Knew
by JHS of Writing My Life
A 1,088 word short story rated PG.

"He said very lit­tle. As I think back on those vis­its now, I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of him ever directly address­ing me, and yet I tell myself that he must have at least asked me how I was, how things were at school …"

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Pure Joy
by Jenn of Mixed Metaphor.net
A 1,330 word short story rated PG-13.

"The past five days were just a bad nightmare now."

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This concludes the one hundred and ninth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Storyblogging Carnival LXIV

NOTE: This is a repost, so I can't guarantee the links.

The latest Storyblogging Carnival is up at Dean's World. There are eight stories this time, from a variety of authors. Go have a look.

Storyblogging Carnival LXIII

NOTE: Once again this is a repost, so I can't guarantee the links.

The latest Storyblogging Carnival is up at The Skwib, Mark Rayner's place. There were only three entries this time, but we decided to go ahead anyway. We've had a couple of really low ones recently, but that may be blamed on the holidays we're just coming out of. If it continues, though, we may have to turn the carnival into a monthly, rather than a fortnightly, event. Let me know what you think.

Storyblogging Carnival LXII

NOTE: This is a repost, so I can't guarantee the links.

The latest carnival is up at Dodgeblogium, hosted by Andrew Ian Dodge. There are eleven stories this time, but five of them are really short, so go have a look.