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A review by ameliareadsstuff
On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association by Mort Castle
dark
informative
medium-paced
3.0
This is a tricky book to review simply because so much of its advice is firmly rooted in the year it was published—2006.
While many of the book's essays contain general horror writing advice that has stood the test of time, there's an even mix of articles that feel varying degrees of outdated. Some feel dated because the genre has moved on or expanded in the intervening years, while others are literally outdated, giving advice that is no longer as helpful (or even true) as it once was. There's also a little bit of this that feels like inside baseball circa 2006—most notably, the inclusion of the Harlan Ellison interview where he spends the duration slagging off the horror genre and horror writers.
On Writing Horror would have been at least a four-star book when it was published almost two decades ago, but now it has sections that read a bit like quaint historical artefacts. I'd love for the HWA to tackle a third edition that takes into account how much has changed in both the real world and the horror world. If you surgically removed the best articles and grafted them onto a new, fresher creation, you could easily spawn a guide invaluable to horror writers of the current moment.
While many of the book's essays contain general horror writing advice that has stood the test of time, there's an even mix of articles that feel varying degrees of outdated. Some feel dated because the genre has moved on or expanded in the intervening years, while others are literally outdated, giving advice that is no longer as helpful (or even true) as it once was. There's also a little bit of this that feels like inside baseball circa 2006—most notably, the inclusion of the Harlan Ellison interview where he spends the duration slagging off the horror genre and horror writers.
On Writing Horror would have been at least a four-star book when it was published almost two decades ago, but now it has sections that read a bit like quaint historical artefacts. I'd love for the HWA to tackle a third edition that takes into account how much has changed in both the real world and the horror world. If you surgically removed the best articles and grafted them onto a new, fresher creation, you could easily spawn a guide invaluable to horror writers of the current moment.