Guest Editorial: Kaaron Warren

Horror is honest. It tells the truth about people, and the past. I love horror for this honesty. There might be hope woven through but there won’t be a happy ending, just for the sake of it, nor lessons learnt to prove a point. The story will go where it honestly needs to go and not hold back, no matter how dark the destination is.

I see the darkness everywhere. Most horror writers and readers do. We see between the cracks, and in the shadows. Beyond the mask. A love of horror means you have insight; you can see the monster beneath the veneer, and you are fascinated by it.

It’s always been this way with me. My classic example is a motivational quote from Mother Teresa my mother had printed and hung on our wall. It goes, ‘It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.’

Nice, isn’t it? Do what you can, even a small action can help.

For me, I saw ‘Curse the Darkness’ and thought, that’s a brilliant title for a horror story. I must have been around twelve or thirteen, I guess. My mother was angry at me for seeing the darkness, and not the light, but I bet most horror readers and writers would see what I saw. I haven’t yet written that story but I started a poem with the title:

The hands were silent

The clock stood still

The man was quiet

And ready to kill

I see the darkness, the possibilities, everywhere. I have multiple boxes of news clippings and other ephemera, all waiting for the story. I have a tiny obituary of a man, dated in pencil with the words ‘his death’ in the margin.

I have a greeting card, written with a very shaky hand, from a couple on a cruise. It ends: ‘All OK with us, but lots of viruses, various, and staff therefore scarce.’

Staff therefore scarce!

I have a children’s educational magazine that tells me Michaelangelo left Florence because a friend had a ‘vision of the dead Lorenzo’. I want to write that story.

I see it. Do you?

I’ve been doing this for a long time, collecting images, inspirations, sparks. I collected clippings about Skylab in 1979 because it was incredible to me that this debris would drop and bring with it elements from outside our atmosphere. What could grow? My story ‘Air, Water and the Grove’, which won an Aurealis Award, came from this some 40 years later! Just as a stay in a rooming house in 1997 led to my novella Into Bones Like Oil (also an Aurealis Award winner), and a number of other stories. The imagery sits and waits. The thoughts do, too, waiting for the time the horror coalesces and I can get it on the page.

I haven’t used all of the inspirations I’ve mentioned yet. You can use them if you like; we’ll all come up with different stories, because we bring our own fears, history, memories, life experiences and prejudices to it. Our own language choices, our own nightmares. Your story about that cruise ship will be different from mine.

I love this about horror. We put ourselves into our stories, so they breathe.

Can you hear that rasping breath?

All the best from the cloud!

Kaaron Warren