A Writer's Tale

How can it be that the very same people who loathe the writers of horror fiction somehow manage to revere such figures as Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Dickens, Dostoevski, Poe, Conrad, Melville, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Brontes, Shelley, Colderidge, Faulkner, Bradbury…  ?

The list could go on and on. Every one of them wrote material that I would call horror.

You’d be hard-pressed to name any major literary figure in history who did not write stories or poetry that could reasonably be defined as “horror.”

And yet those of us who do it here in America at the tail end of Twentieth Century are worthless writers turning out trash that nobody wants to read.

Well, well, well…

They can despise us. They can reject our books. They can pay us next to nothing for the few books that they do buy. They can drive many of us away.

But some of us…

Well, we ain’t going nowhere.

We were here first, and we’ll be here to the last.

The first stories ever told around campfires in the dead of night ages before anyone ever dreamed of a publishing industry were tales of horror.

And if there is to be a final tale told somewhere to a tiny, huddled group of survivors waiting for the end, I know what sort of story it will be.

It won’t be a contemporary romance.

It won’t be a courtroom drama.

It won’t be a techno-thriller.

It won’t be about Hollywood wives or covered bridges or feisty career girls or a professor’s identity crisis.

Hope.

It’ll be about what’s out there in the dark… and coming for them.

It’ll be a horror tale.

50 Favorite Horror Authors

THIS IS A LIST OF WRITERS WHO HAVE WRITTEN EITHER ONE GREAT PIECE or a body of work that I have found to be exceptionally wonderful and frightening.

Remember, this is not supposed to be a list of “the best” horror writers: it is a list of my favorites.

1. Peter Benchley

2. Ambrose Bierce

3. Algernon Blackwood

4. William Peter Blatty

5. Robert Bloch

6. Ray Bradbury

7. Gary Brandner

8. Michael Cadnum

9. Wilkie Collins

10. John Coyne

11. Michael Crichton

12. Roald Dahl

13. Charles Dickens

14. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

15. Larry Dunbar

16. Ed Gorman

17. Davis Grubb

18. H. Rider Haggard

19. Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. James Herbert

21. William Hope Hodgson

22. Shirley Jackson

23. W.W. Jacobs

24. M.R. James

25. Jack Ketchum

26. Stephen King

7. Rudyard Kipling

28. Dean Koontz

29. Ira Levin

30. Bentley Little

31. H.P. Lovecraft

32. Brian Lumley

33. Graham Masterton

34. Richard Matheson

35. Robert R. McCammon

36. David Morrell

37. Edgar Allan Poe

38. Seabury Quinn

39. Ray Russell

40. John Russo

41. Saki

42. William Shakespeare

43. Mary Shelley

44. Dan Simmons

45. Michael Slade

46. Robert Lewis Stevenson

47. Bram Stoker

48. H.G. Wells

49. F. Paul Wilson

50. Cornell Woolrich

My 51 Favorite Non-Horror Authors

MY LIST CONTAINS A FEW NAMES PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED AS HORROR writers. I’ve done this in cases in which a writer has also distinguished himself or herself in writing “non-horror” fiction.

1. Sherwood Anderson

2. Lawrence Block

3. John Buchan

4. Tom Clancy

5. Mary Higgins Clark

6. Joseph Conrad

7. Pat Conroy

8. Michael Crichton

9. Charles Dickens

10. Franklin W. Dixon

11. Feodor Dostoevsky

12. William Faulkner

13. Jack Finney

14. F. Scott Fitzgerald

15. Ian Fleming

16. Brian Garfield

17. William Goldman

18. David Goodis

19. Ed Gorman

20. Winston Groom

21. Joseph Hayes

22. Ernest Hemingway

23. Evan Hunter

24. Stephen Hunter

25. Nikos Kazantzakis

26. Jack Kerouac

27. Dean Koontz

28. D.H. Lawrence

29. Jack London

30. John D. MacDonald

31. W. Somerset Maugham

32. Larry McMurtry

33. David Morrell

34. Charles Portis

35. Flannery O’Connor

36. Ayn Rand

37. Bob Randall

38. Harold Robbins

39. J.D. Salinger

40. Mickey Spillane

41. Glendon Swarthout

42. Robert Lewis Taylor

43. Jim Thompson

44. Trevanian

45. Mark Twain

46. Leon Uris

47. Joseph Wambaugh

48. Thomas Wolfe

49. Stuart Woods

50. Cornell Woolrich

51. P.C. Wren

Laymon’sRules of Writing

Rule 1

“Write the book that you would like to read.”

I don’t know where I first ran into that idea, but I think it’s great. And it contradicts advice that writers often encounter, especially when they are starting out.

Writer magazines, how-to books, teachers and even many agents and editors (who should really know better) suggest that the road to success runs through the Land of Imitation.

They advise you to write “more like” someone else.

More like Mary Higgins Clark, more like Sidney Sheldon, more like John Grisham, etc.

Deal is this…

Why try to write a book that is “like” what someone else has written?

Someone else is already writing that sort of stuff.

The last thing the world needs is another cheap imitation.

But you’ll likely be told otherwise.

If you jump on someone else’s bandwagon and do a fair job of appealing to an established audience, you might get a publisher to hype your novel, and you might end up rich and famous.

You could then be a rich and famous hack.