Combining true horror with epic fantasy

[Phoenixthewriter]

We know Epic Fantasy writers who have made it, is probably the greatest aspiration for many fantasy writers of today. Take Brandon Sanderson who started with Elantris and quickly ramped up to The Stormlight Archives. Good gravy that guy can WRITE!

However, beyond the gripping intensity of a war-wrought thousand page piece of a series, I occasionally have the desire to create something darker than the depths of hell itself. Something so intense you can't believe the stuff you're reading.

Horror books I take pieces at a time thanks to its ridiculous heart pounding terror (and only a few can do that, like the Shining). But epic fantasy I can't put down.

How about a book that brings them both together? Heart pounding terror with page flipping fantasy intensity.

I'm thinking Guillermo Del Toro meets JJ Abrams and Peter Jackson. I heard the song "Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the Wardrums" by APC and while its message was political, my thoughts were dark, and suddenly I had created an entire world of death, nightmare, and absolute soul piercing terror.

My question for all you readers and writers out there is, would a project like this even have a fanbase? And, has there been anything like this brought to the public before that I could look at for perhaps some more inspiration?

 

[Jake Reynolds]

Fanbase? I hope so. Whilst my wip is a fantasy setting, is foremost a horror. Flayed flesh, ravenous dead, insect plagues, mothers killing children, dancing zombie babies...

As Fox Mulder said, 'You can't summon up the Devil and expect him to behave'...

What I mean by that is how, in so many fantasies with an 'epic, greatest evil man has ever known' scenario, all it boils down to is a dude in a cape growing increasingly annoyed at the failures of his minions. If you book the rockstar, you get rock.

 

[Phoenixthewriter]

I'm a big fan of breaking the mold. I mean vampire books and dragon books... Elves and magic... I hate the norm so blasted much that I can't stand to even pick up one of those books for the off chance I might like it.

"Dude in a cape growing increasingly annoyed at the failures of his minions" is cliche, it's tired, it's old. It's not BAD, per se, because you can make it original with a magnificent main character, or situation that is truly a work of your own imagination. However, it's not my cup of tea. If I look at one thing in my book and believe it's a tired old mechanic, I try to go around it.

In the case here there is no dude in a cape. There is only the quest to escape a land that threatens your sanity at every single step.

Maybe I didn't respond to your exact statement. I'm highly considering this as my next project though once my currentl novel is completed.

 

[BookStop]

Considering most horror already has a base in fantasy, meaning the monsters are fantasical and don't really exist int he real world, it wouldn't be much of a leap to assume high-fantasy epic horror would be just as popular. Might even turn some of the horror fans into fantasy fans, IMO, and vice versa.

I've read short stories that seem like they could be part of something more epic that combine these genres perfectly, but I haven't read multiple book series.

I seem to remember lcive Barker's Imajica as a fatasy/horror combo, but I read it so long ago I may be remembering wrong.

 

[HareBrain]

I've got no interest in this myself because I'm a real scaredy-cat, but I imagine the difficulty you'd have with epic horror is keeping it going without the reader getting jaded. You'd had to keep increasing the nastiness to avoid it going flat, but there's only so far you can go before it becomes ridiculous and starts parodying itself.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Well, I don't go along with this sort of thing because I'm the exact opposite of HareBrain-it takes a lot to scare me and very little that is non-existant in the real world can. I suppose I should chalk that up to watching things like The Shining, It, Hellraiser, etc., as a wee little lad.


No, what tends to scare me are certain methods of dying. Any form of suffocation-and that includes drowning. Having one's bones powderized into a fine crystalline dust from a fall over a thousand feet. It's that kind of thing that freaks me out, the sort of thing that could happen to any ignorant idiotic incident-prone individual.


Then again, I can often scare myself anyway with my own imagination....

 

[Phoenixthewriter]

I get what you're saying. I had about 20-30 pages written before backing off of it to continue my primary project, but I had an idea to curb the "Stale" factor that it would probably face.

I mean, if the protagonist is dealing with all these horrific entities, eventually he's going to grow hardened, stronger, braver, until he's almost a monster himself. My brain worked out that if the first half was scary, it could lay the groundwork for the rest of the novel. And then, if the last half kept that tone but really pushed the rest of the story forward, the reader would become just as hardened to the horrors as the hero battles his way through whatever the conflict is, and "saves the day".

Mind you, this is speculation on my part. I haven't touched too hard on this particular subject, but my desire to write fantasy, and the freedom of imagination that horror can offer, it intrigued me to build a world around it and see where it took me.

 

[j d worthington]

It all depends on what you mean by that vague term "horror". If you mean descriptions of mutilation, murder, general goriness and the like... yes, it's been done now and again, though less in what is now called "epic" fantasy (which is another nonsensically vague term, really; much too broad and depending entirely on who one is speaking to as to what it indicates) than in "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy in general. Some of Robert E. Howard's fantasy got quite gruesome in this direction, such as "The Scarlet Citadel", the second Conan tale published, which graphically describes the jailer's demise (through being disembowelled), and then even more graphically describes his reanimated corpse stumbling over its own entrails as it obeys its former prisoner's commands. Then there is the swamp demon in "Beyond the Black River"....

And, if you mean a supernatural threat... that's pretty much a staple of fantasy since as long as there has been such a thing.

Actually, much of fantasy is descended from the gothic and horror genres to begin with; combined with the costume or historical adventure tale; and, if you look at the history of the field, you'll find plenty of blendings of horror with the quest or other types of tale. Even JRRT has plenty of horrors in LotR, from the Ringwraiths (whose very cry carries something of a shattering of the natural order in it), to the Watcher at the Gate, to the Barrow-wights, to the descriptions of Minas Morgul, to.... Karl Edward Wagner's Kane is rife with plenty of horror/terror of different sorts, from Lovecraftian cosmic horror to horror which is tinged with pathos, to the frankly savage horror of some of the tales. Andre Norton's Witch World stories have a fair amount of the horrific to them, as well, from the reanimated dead to ancient powers which should have died out long before the advent of humans, but which linger on in obscure places, and which are truly alien and often very powerfully (if subtly) handled. Howard (again), does quite a bit of this with other of his fantasy tales, too, including "Worms of the Earth" and "The Shadow Kingdom", as well as the modern fantasy "The Cairn on the Headland".

The problem with the scenario presented above ("There is only the quest to escape a land that threatens your sanity at every single step") is that it doesn't just require "the suspension of disbelief" as, in Tolkien's words, that it requires it "to be hanged, drawn, and quartered". Your characters would simply not have survived in such an environment long enough to breed, let alone develop a form of society. There has to be enough stability and peace and quiet to allow for the establishment of not only familial and tribal affinities, but the growth of cultures which provide some safety and normalcy for both individuals and the collective. Without that, human psychology is such that it simply ceases to function in any save the most passive or panicked (take your pick -- look at what happened to those kept in the death camps of WWII, and how they'd often be almost bovine until they were loaded into the lorries and the engine started, at which point they'd become completely insane with fear) fashion. They certainly would lack the ability to plan anything like an escape, and would be unlikely even to be able to imagine any conditions other than those under which they had been living... given their survival at all (an extremely dubious proposition). So you'd have to provide some counterpoint which would allow a reader to believe in their presence in such an environment, and their abilities to cope with emerging difficulties rather than (as tends to be the case with people who do live under such terror-fraught circumstances) to become completely broken and debased psychologically and emotionally.

 

[Phoenixthewriter]

I am taking all you've said J.D. with an open mind.

This is a project I want to tackle and make real. In my mind there is no bad thought or idea. There is only the lack of ability to sell it. If you can tweak it, twist it, and change just a couple of things, a lot of movies/games/books could become best sellers. The creator just wasn't smart enough to catch it, or didn't have the backup necessary to come through with it how they wanted.

I obviously don't feel to comfortable yet with these forums having so few posts, to post an example or plotline I am intending for this, but just knowing whether or not it's doable with the right talent is enough for me.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

With the right talent, just about anything is doable, Phoenix.


But with a lot of typs of horror these days, the challenge is that fine line between excess and just enough to keep things going. Now, I don't know whether or not you wish to instill actual fear into your readers or not-personally I really can't see how entertainment media these days are actually able to-but you have to remember that fear is a raw, primitive emotion, and the hardest to put down-or conjure. I've experienced joy, sorrow, helpless romanticism, adrenaline-pumping action, anger, relief, all sorts of emotions from books I've read. But in my entire quarter century I have not experienced fear from any book or story, and that includes Lovecraft, Poe, Stephen King, the masters of thriller and horror.

 

[Phoenixthewriter]

It doesn't necessarily have to instill fear, but the imagination is powerful and as readers we understand that once the story gets going, you no longer see the words, all you see are the images like a freaking movie.

I want people to be intimidated by what they imagine. I want them to think about it at night when they go to sleep, and then when the cat decides to push the door open and it creaks, they jump at the sound because they can't take their mind off the imagery.

This novel couldn't be built any other way. Either the story sticks with the terrifying visuals of this land, or it gets shelved. Maybe once my primary book is completed I'll throw out test runs of the new one, just giving people the first 5-10 chapters and see what they think.

Who knows, I may even put something up on the critique board and see what happens.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think it depends what you mean by horror. There's plenty of horror in a lot of fantasy. The orcs throwing heads into Gondor by catapult, the new king taking the princess onto the battlements in Game of Thrones - those are moments of horror, and they work because they are an unpleasant surprise and they happen to people we actually care about. They work because the authors put in the background to make us care about the people and places before putting in the nastiness.

A world of continual grinding misery and danger, as well as not being terribly feasible as pointed out above, would get pretty dull soon, no matter how much grisly death was inflicted. It would be like watching the first 5 minutes of Enemy at the Gates a dozen times in a row, or hearing someone describe a wargame (and then 20 soldiers all died. And then 50 more, and in the next turn...). You also run the risk of it becoming comic if it gets really out of hand, or that there is so much darkness that it starts to resemble one of those Tim Burton films where the monsters don't really seem scary so much as just goffik. Perhaps that's why good horror films like Alien and The Shining have good characters too.

My suspicion is that the horror needs to flow naturally out of the story, but no more than the characters and other, more normal parts of a novel, which will make it all the more effective. I think it was Dean Koontz who said trying to write only horror is like trying to play a song on a quarter of the keyboard. You need the other elements to contrast with the horror, or you've got the next album cover for Bolt Thrower rather than a fully-rounded novel that is also frightening.

 

[j d worthington]

Or, as James Goldman had Eleanor of Aquitaine put it: "Dull as plainsong, la, la, la, all on one note".

By all means, go for a combination of horror and fantasy (in the modern sense of the latter). Nothing wrong with that. But remember to keep enough of a balance to retain verisimilitude, especially when it comes to the emotions of your characters. If there isn't relief enough from the horror for them to develop the other character traits we associate with human beings, then they simply wouldn't make it. This would, by necessity, require a predominantly neutral-to-benevolent environment which may (the course of your story) be experiencing a truly horrific situation which is lasting for a (seemingly) interminable interval, with no apparent hope of it ending. That way, you have people who have grown up with enough of the humane side of things to have some reserves of strength to resist the debasement which unremitting terror, according to the lessons of history, inevitably teach. You need that contrast, you need something for both the characters and the readers to be able to identify with enough to make that emotional connection, or all you will have is a series of word pictures without any impact.

The key is not to make it "realistic", but to make it plausible, credible, given the normal range of human emotions....