Social Horror.

Louis Shalako

What is social horror?

Social horror is not stalkers and slashers and psychopaths. Social horror is not vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts or evil spirits.

Social horror is about the little things, it’s about quality of life. It’s about our fears, our perceptions, and oddly enough about our needs.

We all have a need to fit in, to be accepted. Social horror is a bit about being loved, or more accurately, not being loved. We want to feel safe in our homes and in our streets.

I live in a city. It’s in southern Ontario. I don’t have a pathological fear of sharks, or alligators, or crocodiles. 

I’m not likely to run into any where I live. That would be an irrational fear.

To be afraid of spiders is much more common. People freak out and go a bit nuts when they find a spider in the house.

But at least there are spiders in southern Ontario. The fear has at least some rational basis in fact. Spiders exist, they might actually bite you and leave a welt. It could become infected. It might be a spider that came over on a banana boat. The fear is not entirely irrational. And horror is fear.

Aliens with acid saliva and extendable jaws are horrifying enough, before they even do anything. Just looking at them, we knew enough to be afraid of them.

Crime exists in our cities. Some of our fears about crime are irrational. Where I live, the odds of being hacked up by a stalker are pretty miniscule. Yet some still have that fear, and it’s very real to them. Some of those fears are based on their own gender, body size, lack of fighting experience…we all look at these threats based on our own image of ourselves.

Our fears can teach us much.

One of the interesting things I have learned as a writer, comes from confronting certain fears.

The social fears. The fear of being laughed at. No one likes to be mocked.

It’s quite painful. A painful experience is negative. It might arouse our anger, another uncomfortable emotion. 

No one likes being angry. No one likes to live in fear.

So, what would happen if I wrote erotica…and used a female pen-name?

Wouldn’t people laugh at me? Wouldn’t they say all kinds of crazy things about me? Wouldn’t they suddenly have new ammunition to use against me in all kinds of ways…?

Maybe—in a kind of social horror.

That was one reason why I had to do it. I wanted to find out what would happen. And the answer is…essentially nothing happened.

The same thing happened when I wrote gay male erotica under another pen-name.

Nothing happened.

Oh, it’s true that someone might figure it out. Someone might come around and slash my tires. If I walked into a bar someone might say something. Someone might laugh at me, and make cutting remarks and even threats.

That’s social horror. Social horror can lead to real horror. Like in S. Africa, when people start grabbing girls accused of being lesbians and raping them to death with a toilet brush.

Or like right here at home, in the cases of hundreds of thousands of battered women.

It is also the social horror that gays—and women, and people of Islam, and people of colour, the same horror they have had to contend with for generations and centuries past.

Now I know exactly how that feels, ladies and gentlemen.

And I recommend it to anyone who is considering a career in writing or any of the arts. My personal experience is that this should be an elementary school exercise, but what the hell do I know.

As an author, it helped me to stick these big old feet into someone else’s shoes for a while—and to take a little walk in them and to see how it really is. To see what someone else has to contend with for a while.

That was the most wonderful thing I have done in the last five or six years, since publishing my first two novels.

In that sense, writing, and learning about life, has been a wonderfully formative experience not just as a writer but as a human being.

It certainly hasn’t me done any harm. It might even have done some good.

That is the value of confronting one or two social horrors and maybe learning something about them.

We learn an awful lot about ourselves when we do.

I think it's important for a writer to know who they are.

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