Today we have a guest post from author Cassandra O'Sullivan Sachar. In this article we look at the concept of crafting characters. Without those, your horror story, or any story, falls apart. Now, here's Cassandra. Also, check out my Amazon store!
Characters can make or break a horror story, and they need to speak and act in a manner that’s believable. The best, roundest characters are those in whom the author has written something true. We’re far past the days of good guys wearing white and bad guys wearing black; the most compelling main characters, human or not, are shades of gray. Bring on the flawed individuals we want to root for anyway. Spare us the ditzy, cookie-cutter babysitter who purses her lips in an O of horror when she discovers that the call is coming from inside the house; horror fans want her backstory, her secrets, her reason for changing diapers on a Friday night when she could be making out with the quarterback of the football team.
Here are a few tips for crafting characters, along with some examples from various masters of horror:
Make Them Realistic
In order for the reader care about characters, they must come across as people who could actually exist. Stephen King’s most convincing creations wear shades of his own face: a writer with an Achilles heel. In one of his best and most beloved books, The Shining, as well as in the novella Rat from his collection If It Bleeds, the main characters are educators/writers grappling with both writer’s block and mental illness. It is well-documented by King himself that he struggled with addiction in his younger days (Brockes), and he also was a teacher who desperately wanted to succeed as a writer (King, On Writing). While King eventually conquered his demons, he was plagued with alcoholism when he wrote The Shining, and the reader feels the veracity as Jack fights against himself and the horrors of the Overlook Hotel. When we are with Jack, we are privy to his desire for a drink; his shame for having hurt his son when drunk, for harboring continued violent thoughts toward his wife and son, and for not being able to support his family; and his need to accomplish greatness. Even if the reader does not have similar weaknesses or needs, the character is so well-woven that, even as Jack descends into madness/possession by the collective evil of the Overlook Hotel, we root for him, despite everything, wanting him to be the man he knows he could be rather than an implement of the Overlook, until it is finally too late, and all hope is gone.
Though written decades later, Drew Larson from Rat also serves as a King-in-the-mirror. King knows Drew, an educator who desperately wants to finish a novel and is willing to go to extreme lengths for success despite his good guy/family man status. In the way that actors like George Clooney seem to play versions of themselves all the time, King’s characters are often like him: writers and English teachers or professors. He burrows inside these characters’ brains because he understands them.
Paul Tremblay creates a number of characters in A Head Full of Ghosts that are both believable and varied. We empathize with eight-year-old Merry, who is so neglected by her obsessed father and distraught (and borderline alcoholic) mother that she tries to befriend members of a camera crew hired to film evidence of demonic possession in her troubled sister, Marjorie. We see Merry terrified by Marjorie’s behavior while also yearning for their previous closeness and normality. It’s not a nameless, faceless axe murderer who terrorizes the family but members of the family itself, from the screaming Marjorie to the enraged father to Merry herself, whom Marjorie tricks into a terrible act. With the horrible revelation that follows, the reader feels sympathy for present-day Merry, a young woman in her twenties who is deeply affected by the events of her childhood. Tremblay plays his hand carefully, including some sensational elements such as a violent exorcism scene, yet he depicts such realistic and tragic characters that the reader feels sadness more than anything. It’s a beautiful book, a true outlier within the genre.
Share Their Thoughts
Not all characters need to be as likeable as sweet Merry, of course, to be captivating; bad guys can be just as fascinating, and readers want to know what makes them tick. The idea of an anti-hero as main character exploded on the scene in 1940 with Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son, and this concept surged in popularity through the Showtime production Dexter based on Jeff Lindsay’s similarly-titled book series. Caroline Kepnes’s main character in You, Joe Goldberg, may be an anti-hero like these other well-known characters, but the resemblance stops there. For one thing, Kepnes’s choice to write in first-person makes Joe’s descriptions of his murders even worse than Bigger Thomas’s grisly decapitation and brick-to-the-head scenes in Native Son, which were shockingly graphic in that era. We are fully aware of the darkness as well as Joe’s desire to commit these crimes versus Bigger’s feeling that he was trapped. Furthermore, even though he is handsome, intelligent, and charming, much like Dexter Morgan, Kepnes has crafted Joe in such a way that the reader isn’t rooting for him—he’s not Dexter killing off unpunished rapists and murderers to feed his Dark Passenger. Joe kills to possess Beck, which is utterly terrifying and sadly realistic in a world where the most likely suspect in the death of a woman is her significant other. Joe seems almost normal at times, getting annoyed by hipsters and wishing for something more in his humdrum life. But he is not normal—he’s a predator. Once he sets his sights on Beck, a beautiful MFA student, instead of asking for her number like a normal person might after a chance meeting and mild flirtation, his obsession spirals out of control. Early on in the novel, Joe breaks into Beck’s apartment, steals her underwear, takes her phone so he can monitor her email, and follows her from a distance around New York City, often spying on her when she’s alone in her apartment. Soon enough, Joe begins stalking and seeking to eliminate the competitions for Beck’s affection: a pseudo-boyfriend as well as a best friend, and dire consequences follow, all in the false name of Joe’s supposed love for Beck. Joe is completely believable in that so many young women meet some nice-seeming guy who quickly shows his true colors when his advances are rejected, making You a modern horror classic.
While You is written in a chilling first-person point of view, Shirley Jackson uses a limited third-person narrator in The Haunting of Hill House to great effect. Though there is an ensemble cast of characters, the limited third-person narrator zooms in only on Eleanor so that we are privy to her innermost thoughts. A realistic, compelling character, she is naïve for a 32-year-old with limited experience in the world, mostly since she has been, until recently, a caregiver for her now-deceased mother. Eleanor leaps at the invitation from Dr. Montague, a professor and scientist interested in studying the occult, to go to Hill House and assist in his research; she wishes to escape her humdrum life and oppression by her older sister. Rather than fearful, she is cheery as she makes the journey, and the friendless and unloved character becomes a giddy schoolgirl when she meets fellow invitee, Theodora. The two seem to become fast friends, spinning fanciful make-believe stories together, though we soon enough see Eleanor, unused to companionship, becoming annoyed by Theo’s antics, even thinking to herself, “I would like to watch her dying” (124). It’s this darkness in Eleanor, along with her revelation that her mother’s death may be her fault (since she didn’t come when her mother called for help), that makes the reader a bit suspicious of her character. Though we empathize with her need to fit in with the others, the strange happenings at Hill House seem specifically targeted at her, causing Theo to wonder if Eleanor is somehow responsible. Jackson has painted a character sympathetic yet suspicious, unsophisticated yet cunning, and she is fascinating to read and learn more about.
Add Layers
Main characters may be terrifying, pathetic, heart-wrenching, etc., but they must be interesting to capture the reader’s interest. In the English translation of Hye-Young Pyun’s The Hole, both of the two main characters, Oghi and his mother-in-law, are depicted as unlikeable and duplicitous. At the beginning of the novel, Pyun’s description of Oghi’s physical pain, limitations of his almost completely paralyzed body, and anguish cause the reader to feel compassion for him. In addition to these problems, he’s emotionally damaged, as well, grieving for the wife he lost in the accident that crippled him. Later, though, we learn what a selfish man Oghi is: Amongst other offenses, he cheats on his wife and backstabs his friends and colleagues. Pyun hints at Oghi’s self-centeredness early on by naming him alone in the novel; everyone else exists only in what role they serve to Oghi: his wife, his mother-in-law, his colleagues.
Then there is the mother-in-law, a pitiable woman who lost her only child after becoming a widow a short time before. She begins as Oghi’s caretaker but transforms into his jailer and torturer (to an extent). The reader rides a roller coaster of emotions about this character, at first empathizing with her since she was left childless and held responsible for to caring for her son-in-law. Initially, she seemed slightly annoying for wasting his money on priests and for misinterpreting his wishes—Oghi could only communicate through blinking his eyes, and, much later, by writing in a nearly illegible script with the hand which had regained some control. Later, though, she seems to revel in his misfortune, completely stripping away both his dignity and autonomy, even canceling a surgery that was bound to improve his condition. By this point, the reader has no sympathy for the mother-in-law and simply wonders at the reasons for her cruelty, just as we question her obsession with digging a very large hole in the front yard of the house. Though both characters are unappealing, Pyun excels in making them multi-faceted.
Readers of horror deserve more than cardboard cutouts. No matter what heroic or tragic fate the author has in mind for the characters, one rule of thumb is certain: The author needs to develop them before the blood-letting begins.
Works Cited
Brockes, Emma. “Stephen King: On Alcoholism and returning to The Shining.” The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/21/stephen-king-shining-sequel-interview.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, 1959.
Kepnes, Caroline. You. Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2014.
King, Stephen. If It Bleeds. Scribner, 2020.
---. On Writing. 3rd ed., Scribner, 2020.
---. The Shining. Doubleday, 1977.
Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Knopf Doubleday, 2006.
Pyun, Hye-Young. The Hole. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade, 2017.
Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts. HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. Harper & Brothers, 1940.
About Our Guest Blogger:
Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar is a writer and associate professor of English in Pennsylvania. She received her Doctorate of Education with a Literacy Specialization from the University of Delaware and her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on horror from Wilkes University. The editor of a multi-author volume on horror scholarship, No More Haunted Dolls: Horror Fiction that Transcends the Tropes, published by Vernon Press, she has chaired panels on and/or presented horror scholarship at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention and the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference. She is the author of the dark suspense novel Darkness There but Something More (Wicked House Publishing, 2024), the short horror story collection Keeper of Corpses and Other Dark Tales (Velox Books, 2024), the horror novella Close the Door (Unveiling Nightmares, forthcoming), and the middle-grade mystery The Hidden Diary (Tiny Terrors, forthcoming). A member of the Horror Writers Association, she has written horror stories and essays that have appeared in publications including The Horror Zine, Wyldblood Magazine, HorrorAddicts.net, The Angry Gable, The Chamber Magazine, and Tales from the Moonlit Path. She has also served as the fiction editor for River & South Review and is taking over as co-editor-in-chief and creative prose editor of Pennsylvania English. Find her books and read samples of her work at https://cassandraosullivansachar.com/.
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