Horror: The Salt of Storytelling

A little horror shows up in almost every genre and story. That's a good thing.

Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash; alas, there were no scary images of salt, so imagine this is a salt shaker with arms clawing its way up the cliff, I guess.

Like most animals, human beings digest exactly one rock: salt. Salt is so vital that of the five taste receptors we’ve adapted, one is dedicated exclusively to that mineral. A natural salt source will direct animal patterns for hundreds of miles. Virtually every major religion assigns symbolic or ritualistic purpose to salt.

In culinary arts, at least a bit of salt belongs in almost every dish. Its presence has the effect of “waking up” the other flavors it’s partnered with.

Horror has the same effect on other modes of story. Horror is to storytelling what salt is to a dish. At least a pinch belongs in almost every story, and it tends to “wake up” or enliven the other components. It doesn’t belong in every story, but it certainly can have a compelling place in many of them. 

The Importance of Horror

Here we are in the spooky season, and given the approaching holiday I thought it an appropriate time to drop a little storytelling principle of mine. They say to read broadly, and the reason for that is because it leads to nuggets of wisdom one might not find searching locally. This is one of those nuggets, courtesy of the horror genre. You might not personally like horror – candidly, I myself rarely seek it out; too salty, so to speak – but the fact of the matter is the storytelling lessons that come from horror have applications in almost every other genre, and tend to show up in a surprising number of places. 

The following is not meant to be a how-to guide, though I’m happy to share my two cents on that for anyone interested. Any readers of tales of mine like Wyrmslayer know I often incorporate horror elements, even though I write bona fide horrors like Ice & Candlelight less frequently. Instead, I want to give a short homage to an often underappreciated genre by showing specific examples of how, like salt, it augments the tales it is added to. 

Like most genres, horror can be tricky to define. For brevity’s sake I want to forego that meta-discussion and stick to the most mainline definition: horror as a genre is meant to elicit fear. What’s important to note for us is that there are many ways of accomplishing this, but all of them involve instilling in the audience a deep sense of empathy and vicarious participation. This is an objective all stories share in common. Lose it, and there’s little reason for an audience to remain engaged. 

That said, while other genres might have qualities they can fall back on like intellectual value, wonder and awe, or spectacle, a horror writer must become deadly good at getting the audience to care. Because if the audience doesn’t care, they won’t be afraid. 

Much basic plotting advice focuses on choosing stakes the audience will care about, but more fundamentally if the audience cares about the character, they will care about what the character cares about. “Getting to a bathroom” sounds like a downright comedic storygoal… unless you are an elementary school child at the back of a packed schoolbus that’s just zipped past a sign saying “Next Rest Stop: 107mi.” At distance (i.e. when we’re not relating to the child) we can laugh at this scenario.¹ In the moment, it’s horrific. 

Horror is also precisely what’s needed to engender tension and uncertainty. Obviously many genres do this and horror does not monopolize (which is kind of my point), but horror’s focus on fear makes it the distillation of tension, thrill, and uncertainty.

In fact, some of the greatest blockbuster movie directors are those who best leverage horror, many even getting their start in those genres and taking their lessons-learn on to larger-scale projects: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Gore Verbinski, James Gunn, Sam Raimi, even Peter Jackson.²

The value of horror in movies is also evident in absence. Show me an action movie where the action fell short, and I’ll show you a movie that didn’t know how to effectively use horror. In contrast to the original Star Wars trilogy, there’s only one scene from The Phantom Menace that’s generally lauded, and that’s the final duel with Darth Maul. Uncoincidentally, that’s also the one scene that utilizes horror-tension, and with it drives character and theme.

But Is It Right to Focus on Darkness?…

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For some, I suspect reading horror into other genres seems too irreverent. It debases the sublime messaging. It smirches the eucatastrophic vision. It has the value of a freak show.

To this, I would submit the following quote. It’s often attributed to G.K. Chesterton, and though I struggle to find a direct source I nonetheless agree with the quotation: 

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

The examples ahead are filled with cases such as this. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single one to which that quotation doesn’t somehow apply. 

It’s not only this didactic purpose that matters, however. I myself am avidly committed to teasing out themes in all my stories, yet I acknowledge that entertainment is an element of every story – it is not the only element, nor perhaps is it preeminent, but those authors who ignore entertainment value do so at their own peril. A bit of salt makes a meal tastier. A bit of horror makes a story more entertaining. Tastiness and entertainment might appeal to more “base” desires and therefore get a bad rap, but those desires are naturally indicative of higher, deeper, and greater things. Such is the existential contour of reality that even fear is only a warp to meaning’s weft; such is the power of storytelling to demonstrate this cosmological bent. For those who believe the world is inherently good — of whom I am one — then we must be willing to let the world speak for itself, whether glorious or grotesque. We must not doctor out the lurid. We must not omit notes from this symphony. 

With that, let’s look at how horror manifests in a few specific genres.

Horror in Fantasy

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Fantasy is so chock full of horror, the examples write themselves. Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series veers into horror almost every time the bad guys enter the scene: Ineluki’s resurrection is essentially an occult summoning ritual, and from the nightmarish mermaid kilpas to the insectoid ghants to the childlike diggers who pull folk underground, his beastiary is deliciously dreadful. And who can forget sequences like the fall of Naglimund? There might be peril and the threat of death, but what would these sections be without the visceral fear they evoke?

Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is unique in its forays into cosmic horror with reality often getting torn at its stitching. He also succeeded in an uncommon genre feat: his bad guy army’s disposable grunts, trollocs, are genuinely scary. 

Even the books geared toward children like Redwall and Lewis’ Chronicles have their own elements of fear. Consider Asmodeus the snake, or the rising dread as the Pevensie girls follow Aslan to the stone table. 

And of course there’s Tolkien. I’ll forego the numerous low-hanging-fruit examples such as Shelob’s lair or the barrow wights and pick a single emblematic section: Chapter Nine of The Fellowship of the Ring, “A Knife in the Dark.” Strider has led the hobbits out of Bree after narrowly evading an ambush. They’re making their way with all haste through the Midgewater Marshes, but they know they can’t outrun their pursuers. There’s a pall of menace laying over their whole flight, enhanced by the fact that they don’t even see their first Black Rider until evening is falling on Weathertop. 

Around the campfire as night draws in around them and they’re simply waiting to be attacked, Strider tells the story of Beren and Luthien. It’s a tender, almost tranquil moment perched at the darkest point. You probably know what happens next. 

There’s a pattern here. In fantasy, horror is primarily leveraged for immersion. Each of these stories features fantastical worlds to get lost in. Fear and tension stick the imagination powerfully to a sense of place. It brings the reader out of the sky and down to Osten Aard, the Two Rivers, or Middle Earth.

Horror in Romance

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Okay, admittedly I haven’t read too much romance, but in the places I have the horror principles still occasionally show up. Usually these are found in stories that demand rising tension, only the tension is romantic or sexual³ in nature rather than mortal. It’s possible that romance is more like a dessert dish, where a balance of sweetness and bitterness is more important than saltiness. But even ice cream needs some salt. Even chocolate needs a pinch. 

One of my favorite examples is in Madeline Miller’s excellent Circe, where the eponymous Greek demigod on her island of Aiaia has been turning men who wash on her shores into swine for years. Then one evening a certain captain strides in her door asking after his crew, who are of course right outside squealing in her sty on four hoofed legs. She pours him a goblet of the bewitched wine. He settles into a chair, talks with her, toys with the goblet, lifts it to his lips several times then lowers it to ask another incisive question. Throughout the exchange, the attraction between them is palpable thanks to Miller’s use of tension, and the poison the captain toys with makes the whole moment simply throb. It’s only gradually that you realize the captain’s true identity as the veils of allusion between them fall and they reveal their true selves. 

Like in fantasy, the horror here serves a purpose. In romance, the horror drives romantic tension. Not every moment of uncertain, growing attraction requires a weapon or cup of poison between the future lovers, but properly leveraging those tools might call for some salt.

Horror in Literary Fiction

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But surely… surely something so lowbrow as horror could not have infested the great literary classics! They surpass such base conceits! Their erudition flies above such philistine foolery!

Once again I must limit myself to only a few. Enter Cormac McCarthy. The Judge in Blood Meridian grows only more monstrous as the story unfolds, and the ending could be straight out of a wonderfully bizarre Stephen King period piece (ask me about Blood Meridian sometime, it is my favorite book and I have too many words to say about it). The cat-and-mouse pursuit of Moss in No Country for Old Men is terrific, and would the messages resonate the same without Chigurh’s psychotic, reptilian drive? The parabolic Outer Dark is usually categorized as Southern Gothic (i.e. Southern Gothic Horror), and as a case study consider when poor, despicable Culla gets swept away through the night on a broken ferry only to be rescued by a certain diabolical band. None of these stories nor their heavy themes would be remotely as effective without their fear-sculpted antagonists. 

Consider also Steinbeck: Cathy in East of Eden is introduced in explicitly horrific terms, and her depiction doesn’t get any better from there. Moments like the final flood in The Grapes of Wrath and its outcome are what leave a brand in our collective memory for such tales. Jack London’s The Sea Wolf  and its themes of natural selection versus domestic society would simply not work were Larson not a convincingly dreadful force of nature. 

Dostoyevsky certainly wasn’t a stranger to horror, either. I’ll limit myself to only Crime and Punishment: in the opening, we follow our terminally intelligent hero in his premeditation. It’s only gradually his true and terrible design unfolds to the reader. Then when he commits the act, we are trapped in the room with him, watching him deliriously washing the ax, confronting a second victim, pressing the door shut as his plans go sideways… honestly, I think this whole book is underappreciated for the way Dostoyevsky handles peril and uncertainty. And who can forget Svidrigailov, a villain in likeness to Ungoliant in his devouring of light itself, and his scene with Dunya and the gun between them?

In literary fiction therefore, horror can be used to elevate theme. In each of these cases the work had something important to share, and the visceral emotions of fear helped manifest the points the authors wanted to make.

Concluding Thoughts

What’s especially interesting to me here is the end to which horror is leveraged in each of these genres. In fantasy, horror is primarily leveraged for immersion. In romance, it drives romantic tension. In literary fiction, it elevates theme. Each time, the component enhanced by the horror is by and large the component that is most indicative of the genre.⁴ It’s a win-win situation. 

Like it or not, we writers could take some cues from horror. Just like most recipes call for a bit of salt, our stories don’t have to be scary… but they should be capable of scaring. 

1. Comedy (humor) is a different topic, but Charlie Chaplin once said  that “[l]ife is a tragedy when seen in closeup, but a comedy in long-shot,” The difference between evoking either laughter or relation is empathy and distance. In order for horror to be truly effective, it must garner both.

2. And I’m certainly not the first to point this out. Here’s a video essay by one far more conversant in cinema than me.

3. Not necessarily erotic, but certainly sexual. If anyone’s interested, I might eventually write a piece on how to do eroticism in books without becoming voyeuristic or pornographic.

4. I skipped sci fi here because the horror elements seem so readily manifest, but the pattern again holds. Sci fi avidly launches into the unknown to see what repercussions new technologies or discoveries might have for our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The results are often disturbing. Ergo, horror.