User:FeoAmante
Since 1999 I've run feoamante.com. Before that, I ran Feo Amante's Horror Homepage at geocities.com at a free site.
feoamante.com is the home for newbies, wannabees, fans, and creators in all forms of Horror Thriller fiction and that includes Mystery and Suspense.
The problem with Horror fiction as just Horror fiction and nothing else is that so very little of it exists. The moment somebody screams; the moment they run, and the monster gives chase, the story becomes a thriller.
Right up until the monster is discovered, the protagonists are invariably involved in a mystery. The moment right before the monster GETS the victim, usually as the victim is trying to find their way out of someplace dark, is suspense, and all of these separate factors contribute to the modern Horror tale, and by modern I mean for at least the last century. Even as a child watching Scooby-Doo, the monsters were never supernatural monsters, but criminals trying to trick and scare gullible people. The van the friends rode around in was called The Mystery Machine and whenever faced with townfolk tales of ghosts or monsters, Fred would tell the others, "Well gang, it looks like we've got another mystery on our hands."
Edgar Allan Poe is credited as a Horror writer, yet he considered his works to be Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
Mary Shelly, author of The Modern Prometheus aka Frankenstein, is acknowledged with writing the first true Horror novel. Yet at the same time, she is also credited with writing the first true Science Fiction novel, and they are both the same novel!
Bram Stoker is famous for two novels, Dracula, The Jewel of the Seven Stars (The Mummy in film) and The Lair of the White Worm. But all three novels are about the modern scientific world destroying monsters from ancient superstition. In all three, non-religious men of science use their reason to come up with a way to defeat the creature of myth come-to-life.
H.P. Lovecraft is famous for writing stories about mythical creatures that are imagined to be supernatural by their ignorant (and often racially inferior) followers. The hero or (more often) helpless protagonist is the one who somehow survives by recognizing that the creatures are, in reality, natural but not-of-this-earth lifeforms: Aliens from other dimensions, usually. Those lesser humans who believe that the alien is really a supernatural God, invariably wind up dead, betrayed by their belief.
The thing is, the hero that repels/survives the powerful force is exactly the type of engine that drives all thrillers: Every thriller; and I've just named the top Horror writers of all time.
The difference between a Horror Thriller and a thriller is a Horror Thriller MUST be scary. Even if it is a tale of vampires, if there are no actual scares going on, then the vampire tale isn't scary, it's merely fantasy - as any supernatural occurrence would be.
What I wish to contribute to this Horror project is the understanding that Horror fiction is not a unique embodiment but the sum of many parts.
What I would like to see in bookstores are Horror novels that are not incorporated into the drama and regular fiction shelves, but kept apart as Horror Thriller or even Horror Thriller side by side with Mystery Suspense. This would return first time authors, that new readers would like to take a chance on, to a place where they could be found easily, instead of diluted into several aisles of anonymous fiction that ranges from drama to comedy to romance.
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