Shaun Allan’s Singularity Books is proud to introduce Darker Places!

What if you could steal the final moments from the dying? What if you had the darkest secret, but couldn’t think what it might be? What if you entered the forest in the deep of the night. Who is the melting man? And are your neighbours really whom they appear to be?

So many questions.

To find the answers, you must enter a darker place. Thirteen stories. Thirteen poems. Thirteen more doorways.

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Why horror not taking itself seriously is a good thing

Horror, by its nature, is a serious, painful ride into our darkest fears – whether it’s the ‘boo’ factor of a true film that causes us to jump, or an all-out gore fest that makes us wince, horror is designed to elicit certain responses from us.

Which is why I’m happy to be able to write this article.

Dark humor 101

One of the areas I’ve been madly in love with lately, especially in relation to horror, are the movies that take tropes and somehow flip them. Whether it’s reinventing the expectation of the audience in The Evil Dead follow on (I mean number 2, not the remake) where Ash sees all of his horror as not actually terrifying, but overacted brilliantly in places, to give that sense of almost Victorian over-drama, to Tucker and Dale vs Evil, where a pair of luckless guys end up being blamed for several teen suicides, a kidnapped luckless ‘virgin’ who they rescued and all sorts of other shenanigans, including, at one point, one of the kids jumping head first into a tree shredder. Neither of them play particularly bright characters (and are in fact, almost stereo-typically “deep south”) and are caught up in what looks like a serial murder, but is actually just their bad luck.

And then there’s Cabin in the Woods. A friend of mine recently talked about watching it with her 15 year old, new to horror son, and how he got all excited and geeked out at really cool characters (like Hellraiser, or the Ring’s facsimiles in the project) while she took great pleasure in telling him, that, the horror, it would be three years before he’d even GET the references.

This is the same friend who talks about the original Thing, and the 1982 remake as if they are the pinnacle of horror, so I’m fairly certain that her son is going to get a great education in the basics of horror. Which is actually really important – horror will evolve with it’s audience, and the young audience are desperate for good horror, that’s age appropriate, and still captivating. Skipping the tropes for them would bring a whole new perspective to horror – one founded on the cult ideas of classics, but firmly grounded in the future of horror.

Humor or bust

One of the commonalities with these films, when it comes down to it, is that the character being so expertly lampooned is a trope that we expect to see. They’re ‘lazy writing’ if they appear as their sterotypes, which means in some ways, the author has to flip them all the harder, because simply reversing them isn’t enough. I’ve talked in brief about where I think horror is going in the coming years, and I think that it’ll be in these clever, not quite as it seems looks at the world, with a horror bent, rather than revitalizing old, tired tropes. There’s nothing scarier than new…except maybe the new made from old, with an unexpected twist. I like to think I capture this in my own novels, but I guess time will tell.
What’s your favorite horror movie?

A writer of many prize winning short stories and poems, Shaun Allan has written for more years than he would perhaps care to remember. Having once run an online poetry and prose magazine, he has appeared on Sky television to debate, against a major literary agent, the pros and cons of internet publishing as opposed to the more traditional method. Many of his personal experiences and memories are woven into Sin’s point of view and sense of humour although he can’t, at this point, teleport.

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