A Manner Of Speech

I've always been a fan of stories of the paranormal. From childhood to a ripe old age, they've been my guilty pleasure. In recent years I've penned a few macabre meanderings in both poetry and prose.

I've read the masters of horror, science fiction, the macabre and realized I really enjoy psychological suspense much more than blood and guts horror. Gore is just not of main interest to me.

A few days ago I borrowed a library book of Victorian ghost stories. I settled in for a good read. As I read the first story I found it to be verbose and affected. I continued on to the second story and it was the same. I returned the book to the library and borrowed a good old Stephen King novel. I like his style, down to earth. It can be gory at times but more often it's the psychological tension that makes his work great. He would never be famous in the Victorian age. His style is far beyond what was considered too much for those days. I like the suspense, I like the construction of his characters and I even enjoy the shock of an expletive occasionally.

  Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein have been staples to read again and again. I've always been attracted to the Victorian era but give me a Stephen King novel with all it's twisted plots and twisted characters for it's the best of his genre anytime.

It encourages me as a writer to know that the most famous horror author of our time started out in a mobile home with a huge collection of publisher rejections. He found inspiration in the most mundane and fantastic. He thought without boundaries and became the master of “What if.” Writing as a person of another time can be challenging but being real and exposing the suspense of our own time, that may be the most difficult test of all. Stephen King makes it look easy and gives me hope that it will be easy for me too.