Edmonton Journal, June 26,2000
Edo van Belkom has...an empathetic soul to show you the blood-greased ropes of the horror biz.


The London Free Press, June 3,2000
...a nuts-and-bolts how-to addition to the Self-Counsel Press Writing Series.


The Province, April 16,2000
Van Belkom treads fearlessly through the graveyard of horror cliches...offering a systematic approach to fresh and creative scare-mongering.


Edmonton Sun, June 11,2000
It's a how-to text of frightening for fun and profit.


Coast Independent, September 10,2000
For the ultimate guide to how it is done, you need Edo van Velkom's Writing Horror.


From the Back Cover
Think you have the makings of a good horror writer? The craft of horror fiction has its own rules. Writing Horror takes you through the process of creating horror, including the art of suspending reader disbelief, the creation of atmosphere and believable characters, and the seven steps of plotting. From psychological to supernatural horror, from vampires to dark fantasy, Writing Horror provides practical advice on starting and finishing your manuscript, getting a response from publishers, and cracking the pro market. This comprehensive guide to the horror genre also shows you how to -- - Keep track of your ideas - Turn an idea into a story - Know when and how to use an outline - Create atmosphere and characters - Use point of view effectively - Develop skill in writing dialogue - Avoid what’s been done to death - Write horror for young adults - Sell your horror fiction Writing Horror also features interviews with ten masters of the horror genre.


About the Author
Edo van Belkom has published more than 150 short stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, including Robert Bloch’s Psychos, Year’s Best Horror Stories XX, and the Northern Frights series. His first novel, Wyrm Wolf, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist in 1995, and in 1997 he won the award for his short story "Rat Food" (co-authored with David Nickle). He has edited several horror anthologies, including Northern Horror and Be Afraid!, and his collection of short stories, Death Drives a Semi, is published by Quarry Press.


Excerpted from Writing Horror by Edo Van Belkom. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Differences between Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are all very closely related. Each is part of the genre called speculative fiction, or SF for short. All three have speculation at their core, a single question: What if? What if we were able to travel through space to other worlds? What if dragons and unicorns were real, and wizards could cast spells? What if the dead rose up from their graves with an insatiable hunger for human flesh? Because they are so closely related, the lines between the genres are quite often blurred, and a work of horror ends up being disguised as science fiction. The first Alien film is a perfect example of this. The crew of a spaceship discover they have an unwanted guest on board -- the alien of the title -- and they must do their best to get rid of it before it gets rid of them. Replace the alien with any monster of your choice and the spaceship with a haunted castle, and you’ve got a classic tale of horror. But despite the crossover between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, each one still contains key elements that set it apart from the others. These have to do with the parts of the body and mind that each genre appeals to. I don’t think anyone would argue the statement that science fiction is the genre of the mind. It is an art form that makes you think, examining and solving problems by way of science and technology. In its classic form, science fiction requires that you take what is known in our world and extrapolate that knowledge to imagine what might happen in the future. Carrying on with this notion, one could say that fantasy is the genre of the heart. Fantastic stories are the stuff that dreams are made of. Think of the Iowa farmer in W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (later made into the successful film Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner), who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield and attracts the ghosts of long-dead ball players to play on it. Or consider the key ingredient in most heroic fantasy or tales of swords and sorcery -- the never-ending battle between good and evil. Even this, in the Star Wars films, has been cloaked by the trappings of science fiction and the temptations of the dark side of the force. So if science fiction is the genre of the mind, and fantasy is the genre of the heart, what might horror be? One clue is what happens to you when you read a particularly chilling horror story. Your heart might begin to race, your breathing becomes more rapid, and tiny goose bumps rise up on your flesh, leaving you with a tingling feeling all over. Horror is the genre of the senses. The object of horror fiction is to elicit some sort of response from the reader. When it’s good, horror can make your skin crawl, your pulse race, your body break out in a cold sweat, and your hair stand on end. And even when it’s bad, horror can elicit a response. Oftentimes horror writers resort to the gross-out -- truly ghastly images and occurrences explained in excruciatingly vivid detail. While not as elegant as shadows across the moors or the whisper of death through the trees, the gross-out is still an integral part of horror because of the response it elicits: it turns your stomach. Horror Movies versus Horror Fiction People usually judge the merits of a particular genre by its lowest common denominator. For example, those without a genuine interest in science fiction might refer to the genre as sci-fi (the term used to describe it in the pulp era) and treat it with disdain because their only exposure to it has been through what they’ve seen on late-night television. But while B-movies about bug-eyed monsters and Mars needing women are part of the science fiction genre, they are not its shining example. The same is true in the horror genre. The most easily identifiable icons in horror these days are the monsters that were popular in 1980s movies like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. While Jason and Freddy are credible movie monsters providing shock entertainment through more than a dozen movies (and the string of lesser imitations that tried to cash in on their popularity), they aren’t the best the horror genre has to offer. So when people say, "I don’t like horror," they’re often saying it with these film characters in mind. Would they say the same thing about the movie Jaws? You might not think of it as a horror film, but how else would you describe a tale about a monstrous shark terrorizing a peaceful resort community off the New England coast? It’s a monster movie, plain and simple. All of which brings us to horror fiction -- novels and short stories -- which can be every bit as diverse as horror in film. Many readers say they don’t like the horror genre because they don’t like reading about supernatural monsters or psychopaths killing people in gory baths of blood and guts. Such splatter is part of the horror genre, but it’s not all there is to it. Horror is also Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Thomas Harris’s, The Silence of the Lambs, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. These are classics, and might even be favorites of someone who emphatically states they do not like horror. The next time someone says to you, "I don’t like horror," ask him or her what type of horror he or she means. If the only response is that he or she doesn’t like Jason and Freddy, consider it an opportunity to educate and inform a latent fan of the genre.

SYNOPSIS