So the label 'horror' for books or movies doesn't mean that every book is supposed to give you a heart attack, just like not every 'romance' makes your heart thump. It refers, like everything, to history and aesthetic. Misery, Slugs & The Turn of the Screw are 'horror' but--

they're vastly different. People who tend to frown and ask me 'why do you read/write horror' tend to do it because they think horror is only this:

There's nothing wrong with The Shining, either the movie or the book, but The Shining is not emblematic of the many variations of horror. Horror is also this:

And you can make a very good argument that this is also horror. It certainly is a ghost story and a Gothic novel (though not all Gothic novels are horror and vice versa).

These books are 'horror' because, like I said, they share a history and an aesthetic. Beloved is a cousin of The Turn of the Screw. The 'nature gone mad because of humans' horror sub-genre shares genetic material with Shelley.

Are all these books trying to 'scare' you or give you a heart attack? Certainly not. Interview With the Vampires is pretty low on 'scares,' for example.

Ok, but then what *is* horror. It's a huge category with many branches, like any evolutionary tree.
Ok, but then why write *horror* instead of, say, something more respectable, such as a thriller?

Well, once upon when horror was a big, important category thrillers with elements such as serial killers *were* shelved under horror and V.C. Andrews for years appeared next to Stephen King though there is nothing 'scary' about Flowers in the Attic (worrisome, perhaps).

And respectable horror fare such as Dracula is shelved under 'classics.' So there's some malleability here.

So now we're getting to the answer of why write horror? Remember in the beginning when I said horror has a history and aesthetic. Well... that's why. You can straight up tell a story of Indigenous history and pain in a realistic way. But you can also write The Only Good Indians.

Horror has, like any other genre, a mountain of tools that you can use to build a house. It can be highly sophisticated and use extremely ornate language (Tanith Lee) or it can be pulpy (the Crabs series, which is a bit adorable).

As we get into Halloween it's easy to begin talking about 'spoopy' books. But this is a reminder that horror is not only for one month of the year and that horror is richer, more complex and has as much history as any other category. In other words: explore horror.