How Horror Has Made Me a Better Writer

Published October 29, 2024

By Monique Bos

I’ll never forget the first Stephen King book I read: Pet Sematary. 

I was sixteen, and at the religious high school I attended, horror was neither part of the canon taught in class nor approved extracurricular reading. But other kids talked about how terrifying his books were, and one of my friends raved about his characters. People who dismissed him as a genre hack were way off base, she explained; his genius wasn’t in writing scary scenes, but in creating people who felt so real and authentic that you cared intensely about what happened to them. 

I wanted to be a writer, so I rationalized that reading him was a necessary part of my education. Still, buying a copy of Pet Sematary at the Waldenbooks in Chapel Hills Mall gave me a rush of guilty pleasure. 

I read the book with anticipation that quickly faded to disappointment. I didn’t find it scary. I didn’t get what the hype was all about.

But after I finished it, a vague, lingering unease haunted me, especially late at night. I slept with the lights on for weeks.

By the time I was partway through college, Stephen King had become my go-to author for gorgeous fall afternoons—like the ones we’ve been experiencing lately—when the sun fires the brilliant colors of the trees, and the sweet smell of crushed leaves fills the air. Curled up in an armchair in my dorm room, seated on a bench outside the library, barefoot on the patio of an off-campus apartment, I spent successive Octobers devouring the classics: ’Salem’s Lot, It, The Shining. I even learned how to skim the required reading for my English classes so I had more time to indulge my craving for horror.

King wasn’t the only author I read, of course. Some I loved, like the Welsh novelist Phil Rickman. Others I found entertaining but forgettable. Others landed on the DNF pile. 

I quickly learned that what engaged me were the characters: If I didn’t care about the people in the story, I wasn’t invested in what happened to them, how (or even if) they survived.

In graduate school, I took a fiction-writing workshop. My classmates wrote self-described “serious literary fiction” and despised anything that hinted at genre. Genre was driven by plot, I was told, while literary fiction focused on character development. They spoke disparagingly of Stephen King, although when I asked, I learned none of them had read anything he’d written. 

But while I found their judgment uninformed, I didn’t dare say what I thought: that we all could have benefited from more time spent between his pages. Because all of us, including me, turned in story after story about self-absorbed, self-destructive, insipid brats—thinly veiled versions of ourselves. None of us knew how to create compelling characters out of the tangles of angst and experience and messy relationships that we were trying to form into cohesive identities. We didn’t understand how to people our stories with a supporting cast that didn’t just exist as good or bad foils for our protagonists. We didn’t know how to get into other people’s heads, imagine the dreams and disappointments, the struggles and triumphs, that had shaped who they became and how they interacted with the world. 

I doubt any of us created a single character as compelling as one of King’s cameo convenience store cashiers or greasy-spoon cooks. 

And without strong characters, our stories fell flat.

Stephen King, and horror more broadly, has taught me that regardless of the genre—whether you’re writing serious literary fiction about the loss of a family farm, or a romantasy about the sexy werewolf who followed you through the woods beneath the full moon, or a vivid description of the monster under the bed—the characters are what make a story transcendent.

The characters are the difference between whether I read a book or abandon it after a few chapters—as I did with a work by one prominent horror writer, who couldn’t even make me care about a toddler. (Toddlers, along with animals, are low-hanging fruit: I’ll always flip to the end of the book to see if the baby, cat, dog, or goose survives.) Bland characters are the reason I skip entire paragraphs, skim the dialogue, and toss the book on my trade-in stack when I’m finished.

But if the characters are compelling, I underline eloquent passages, write notes in the margins, laugh out loud, wipe my eyes, stay up far too late when I have to work the next morning, and mourn the end of our friendship when I turn the final page.

Compelling doesn’t have to mean likable—in fact, sometimes part of the compulsion is finding out the fate of a character who doesn’t deserve a happy ending. Ronald Malfi’s Small Town Horror kept me reading because it was deliciously spooky, but also because I wanted to know what would happen to characters I found increasingly reprehensible as I learned more about them. I felt the same way throughout the film Abigail: I couldn’t root for anyone, but the reveals fascinated me, and I was thrilled to be along for the ride.

And compelling isn’t the same for everyone, or even for us at different times in our lives. Characters I found intensely relevant in my twenties seem shallow and vapid to me now (yes, there’s a theme here). I’ve grown into others, like the cast of Pet Sematary. Friends have raved about characters I found trite and predictable, while I’ve failed to convince them to share my own favorites. 

What has challenged and inspired me as a writer, though, is identifying which characters engage me and why, seeing how authors take parts of themselves and craft them into fictional creations that are genuine and engrossing and stimulating. As the horror genre has expanded, so has my canon of favorite characters—Monica Brashears’ Magnolia from House of Cotton, Erika T. Wurth’s Kari from White Horse, and Isabel Cañas’ Beatriz from The Hacienda are just a few of the fictional women I’ve enjoyed spending time with recently. And they’ve all taught me a little more about how to craft compelling characters and how truly spooky horror functions.

Because the more we care about them, the more the terrifying aspects of the story work. When we’re invested in their fates, we’re disturbed or chilled by the forces that threaten them, whether those are human evil, supernatural spooks, or a combination of both. When we’re engaged with them, we want to experience how they change and grow when they face the unthinkable. But if we can’t imagine ourselves in their place, then we can’t grapple with how we too might face the unthinkable.

And that’s part of why I love horror: what it demands of me, and how it offers catharsis.

Monique Bos works as the communications manager for Pikes Peak Habitat for Humanity. She also has taught writing at the university level, reviewed mysteries for Publishers Weekly, and served as the managing editor of a weekly newspaper. Her short fiction has appeared in small-press anthologies and online journals. She enjoys long walks with her partner and their dogs, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, nature photography, and everything books.