What scares you?

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Everyone, regardless of what they might tell you, is afraid of something. Some people are scared of talking in front of an audience, others fear heights. Many people fear death because they don’t know what comes after.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this. I’ll tell you. I’m a writer. I do fiction and nonfiction, but mostly fiction these days. I mainly write westerns, the traditional kind except more historically accurate than those from the past, recognizing the role played by women and minorities in settling the American western frontier. Recently, though, I was asked by my publisher to do a story for a new label the company was launching, horror, but to set it in the Old West. Always up for a challenge, I said yes.

This kind of cross-genre writing is nothing new in the western genre. There have been sci-fi westerns, steampunk westerns, you name it, it’s probably been tried. I think there might even have been a stab at western horror tales sometime in the not-so distant past, but the genre had declined so much I hardly noticed. The traditional western started making a comeback about eight or nine years ago, and my publisher, DS Productions, is in the vanguard of pushing the limits, with traditional westerns written in the pulp style of the 1940s, western romance, and now western horror.

Enough of the shameless self-promotion, though. What I want to talk about is just how you write horror, specifically western horror, but also horror in general.

First you start with a character that readers can identify and empathize with, then you think of a western setting, and when that is solid, you come up with something that will scare their boots off and you start writing. Sound simple? It actually is.

The hard parts of this are the first two, which, by the way, are also the hardest regardless of the genre. In my case, I’ve centered on two characters: a fourteen-year-old orphan girl, and a twenty-something man, also an orphan, Felicity Snow and Toby Cane. They are in separate stories, but someday might meet, depending upon audience reaction to both. The setting I chose was the Dakota Territory, specifically around the Badlands, a desolate and isolated area that lends itself to dark stories.

The easy part is the horror. Just have your characters going about their normal lives in this somewhat abnormal environment and then introduce something that scares people.

In my first story, The Awakening of Dragons, I have Toby Cane, a young African-American former slave who served as a cabin boy on a ship and was the sole survivor of a shipwreck off Japan. He was adopted by a band of samurai and trained as one. Back in America at the command of his samurai master to help one of their American friends who is a rancher in the Dakotas, he finds himself having to battle monsters that everyone thought extinct, but who had survived in a cutoff canyon that was opened to their world because of an earthquake. Except for the survival of a species of small but particularly vicious dinosaur, everything about the story is credible, and who is not scared of something that can swoop in under cover of darkness and rip you to pieces with its sharp claws?

The second story, soon to be published, Revenge of the Revenants, tells of the adventures of fourteen-year-old, Felicity, who lives with her parents on a homestead near the badlands. The land is, according to the local Indian tribes, cursed, but the Snows don’t know that until strange beings appear to Felicity. Revenants, beings returned from the dead to exact revenge, are the inspiration for many zombie movies, but think of them as zombies on steroids. They must eat human heats and brains to survive and they are super powerful. Scary? Bet your boots they are.

I won’t spoil it by telling you how my heroes prevail and survive. I hope you’ll buy the books and find out for yourselves. Let’s just say that these, and coming volumes, tap into the fears that are common to us all. Fear of snakes, spiders, death, you name it.

Tell me what scares you, and you just might find yourself in my next book. – NWI