EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I’ve had a bugger of a headcold the last couple of days. Sinuses are all stopped up; head’s full of pressure and pressurized snot; nose seems to have an endless supply of thin, yellow mucus to drip; throat’s all sore and scratchy and raw feeling. It’s horrible.

But I’m sitting here, not really thinking about anything, just letting my mind wander. I started thinking about the book I’m reading. Stephen King’s newest Dark Tower book, The Dark Tower. (I’m sure he had to think for hours to come up with that name.) It’s a great book so far. I’m over 3/4 of the way through it. It’s kind of sad, though. There are rumors that this is his last book, or one of his last few. I’ve enjoyed reading his stuff for a long time. The first book of his I read was It in the 10th grade. I read it for a two-week book report. Everyone thought I was crazy trying to read a 1,000+ page book in two weeks. I sailed through it, though. That book was a page-turner and a half. Ironic that that would be the first book I would read, since it ties in to the Dark Tower series, at least a little bit.

That started me thinking about writing, though. I thought I was a writer in middle school and high school. I wrote stories and poems and a screenplay or two. Everything was under 10 pages and it all seemed rather…I dunno, morbid. It’s all a bunch of claptrap/hooha/poo now, though. It just wasn’t quality.

When you’re young, horror is blood and guts and everyone dying. That was all I wrote about then. Everyone would die by some means, each more gruesome than the last. It was a shame to kill two or three characters at a time, though. That limited the amount of blood in the story. So you pick ‘em off one by one until there’s just one left. He/she gets to see the killer and then slash all done.

Then you get older and you realize it’s not the bumps in the night that are scary. It’s the spaces between the bumps. The times of slithering and waiting and sneaking and moving quiet as a mouse. The times when you’re not sure if that shadow’s from the tree outside, the coat on your chair, or something else.

That’s one of the things I always liked about great horror writers. They realized that it’s not the death; it’s not the killing; it’s not the blood. It’s the cut and the knife. The hand that’s holding it. The heart that weilds it.

H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King….Who do you love as horror writers?