We need to kind of refresh our fear in order to refresh our understanding of how a safe place works.
Andrew Pyper
I'd read 'Paradise Lost' as an undergrad at university but remembered little about it. No, not true: I remembered few details, but carried with me with the persuasive arguments and pitiable dilemma of its arguable protagonist, Satan.
Horror, for me, is not defined by the thing that provokes one's fear, but the human being who has contact with it.
Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
I just hated the law. I wasn't cut out for it. I couldn't imagine spending my life doing that, so I quit before I began.
There's something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.
What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park.
To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.
I enjoy a special collegiality among other writers in the thriller community. They call me 'Canada's scariest writer,' and I love that.
If the hairs on my neck stand up while I'm writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.
Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.
Monsters just outside our peripheral vision are scarier to contemplate than monsters miles away or in someplace only a fool would set foot in.
