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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