My name is C. Dennis Moore and I’m a horror writer. I’ve pretty much always wanted to be a horror writer. It was never the idea of wanting to be a writer, and then finding horror, or being a writer who wrote horror. No, I wanted to be a HORROR a writer, a writer of, specifically, horror.
Why?
Don’t know. I guess it just never occurred to me to be any other kind of writer.
I mean, growing up, I always knew there were other types of books out there, but I never read those books. To be fair, I didn’t do a lot of any kind of reading when I was younger. But on those occasions you saw me with a book, you better believe there was a monster in it somewhere.
To me, for the way my brain works, horror fiction is just the only kind of writing that ever made sense. For the way my brain works.
I’m not a sociable person, I have a hell of a time connecting with other people and the way they think, their problems and solutions. I couldn’t write a Hemingway-type story if my life depended on it. That’s not to say I couldn’t find enjoyment from READING a literary novel. I just don’t have it in me to WRITE one.
And that isn’t to say I haven’t branched out since my first story back in 1991. I’ve written some science fiction, but let’s not kid ourselves; science fiction is as close a cousin to horror as you’re going to find in literature. I’ve written a small amount of fantasy, which is right there on the border, within walking distance of horror.
I’ve written superhero tales (my second greatest love in the world of fiction is superhero comics), I’ve written some erotica. I’ve even written a story or two I viewed as romance (with some obvious speculative elements to make it interesting to me). But I’ve never strayed too far from my first and greatest love in fiction: Horror.
So why horror? Why was that always my main focus when it came to writing? Was it the steady diet of Stephen King I fed my creative brain on in high school? And by fed my brain, I guess I could say starved my brain of ANY other fiction except comic books? Might be. Or maybe I read almost strictly King novels because horror was the only prose that could hold my attention and keep me coming back the next day to see what happens next? I read THE DARK HALF, about a writer or dark fiction, over the course of three or four nights one winter while lying on the floor in front of the fireplace when I was a senior in high school. It was almost right after finishing that book that I began planning my first serious attempt at writing.
And even before I was a big reader, if I was renting movies, my first stop was ALWAYS the horror section. If I was going to the theater, chances were pretty damn good, I was seeing a horror movie. Horror has been at the top of my list of likes for as long as I can remember.
The macabre, monsters, the dark corners, the shadows, the things that make a normal person shake and shiver, I’ve just been drawn to that area my entire life.
I’ve read studies on the health benefits of being scared, and how “when you’re sacred, the stress response in your brain begins. You experience an adrenaline rush that floods your muscles with oxygen, providing you with more stamina and strength under stress.”
I’ve also read how “Fear, or getting scared, is an emotion that’s part of our biology as human beings, just like other emotions such as sadness, joy and anger. It serves a purpose that’s crucial to our ability to survive.”
But for me, for my attitudes toward fiction and, again, the way my brain works, it’s just the only area that really holds my interest or fascinates me at all.
While I’ve dipped my toe into reading some fantasy, most of it all feels like the same tired Tolkein retreads. Quests and swords and magic and I don’t care. In science fiction there’s a lot of space battles and Star Wars or Star Trek clones. Granted, there are a lot of King clones in horror fiction, but it all comes down to a question of belief and potential reality.
See, I don’t believe in dragons or sorcerers or spaceships and laser blasters. I don’t wake up from a dead sleep after hearing a weird noise in my dark house and wonder if the unicorns are coming to get me. I don’t sit here at 4:00 AM while the world is still dark, hear a creak outside my office door, and wonder if there’s an alien out there creeping around or if it’s my wife going to the bathroom. But it could be a ghost. I’ve had enough unexplained situations growing up in various houses, not to mention the things I’ve heard just in THIS house over the decades I’ve lived here, that I honestly can’t say with any certainty it IS my wife, or one of the boys, or the dog walking around outside my office. It could be something else. It could be whatever I hear opening the pantry door sometimes when I know I’m home alone. It could be whatever I used to hear tapping on my office door when I was in the back bedroom and I lived alone, after my daughter moved out, before Kara and I got together. There are noises in this house, and I don’t know where they come from, but I know what kind of novel they would be at home in and it isn’t a Hallmark Christmas novel.
And while I do get uneasy sometimes about being here in this big house by myself at night, I don’t cower in the living room with all the lights on because I’m terrified, I embrace the feeling because horror is in my genes.
My earliest memory is seeing THE EXORCIST at a drive-in when I was very little, too little to know what the hell was going on, but those vague memories of demon-possessed Regan followed me throughout my young life until I was able to comprehend my surroundings and saw the movie again once I’d reached an age where I could properly discern what was what. Maybe those images and ideas shaped my thinking and my personality. Maybe it was my first drug and I’ve been chasing that feeling my entire life. That feels right; I’ve definitely been on a search for fifty years now for a horror movie that made me feel like THE EXORCIST did. Still searching, although I’ve come very close several times over the years.
I think another part of it, a darker, more hidden part, is that, for most of my time here, I’ve often felt very ill-equipped at Life. Just little things get me from time to time, and at 51 I’m still learning how to navigate this world we live in. But I’m very much NOT a live-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person, I like to prepare and plan, and I know there are things life’s going to throw at me, things I’m not prepared for, things that are going to scare the crap out of me. Horror, loving and exploring it, has given me a calm in the face of some adversities, because I’m come across terrors in fiction before and seen characters overcome it. If they can do it, I can do it. Hell, I’m probably the only person I know who, on an almost daily basis, will see a location and think “That would be a good place to set up in the zombie apocalypse” and think it without a hint of irony or humor. Because when the shit goes down for real, I can say that a lifetime of horror prepared me for this eventuality, and I know what to do next.
Then again, who cares why I love horror? I just do. It’s fun. Every novel, every movie, every idea, they’re like the highest, steepest part of the roller coaster and you’re going up and up and seeing the ground get further and further and you KNOW if things go wrong right now, you’re dead: “okay, now HOW do you get out of this” is always my thinking, because the world has presented me with his horrible scenario, now it’s my job to figure out a way to survive it. And, to me, that’s just way more interesting than another quest for the lost king or which alien race is plotting against which alien race. Who cares, just give me a creaking board on the other side of a closed door while the lights are out and I’m a happy guy.