Zigzag Timeline: Jersey City Writers' Genre Night: The Horror of Love

Friday, February 19, 2016

Jersey City Writers' Genre Night: The Horror of Love

Mary SanGiovanni talks about writing horror

This past Wednesday was Jersey City Writers' first Genre Night of the year, and it was awesome! Mary SanGiovanni (author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated novel The Hollowers, which is said to have sparked the Slender Man urban legend). Just so happened it was also Women in Horror month. It's kismet!
Genre Night is a quarterly JCW event where local actors read flash fic and/or poetry by local writers, and this quarter's theme was The Horror of Love... Basically, a romance/horror mashup. The "love" part was because of Valentine's Day, and the horror part was because our guest speaker was horror author extraordinaire

Mary kicked things off with a reading from her novella, For Emmy, a chilling story about people who go missing, then talked about the horror genre. Now, I'm terrified of horror, which is partly why it fascinates me so (I don't read as much of it as I should.... mostly because AHHH SCARY). But I found something Mary said very interesting: that incorporating love into horror stories is what makes them really hit home. Because when you care about the characters (and the characters care about each other), the terrifying things that happen to them feel more real.

Then came the readings! Here's Adriana reading my flash fic, "Drops of Red" (the text of which will be posted on the Jersey City Writers website):

And here are pics of the other readers. They all did an amazing jobs, and the stories were really chilling (they'll all be posted onto the JCW website) in their own ways. By the time we were done, I was all shudder-y.