the point of horror is to leave you feeling unsettled. jump scares, special effects, and monsters are not necessary. when writing horror, write about what scares you. what keeps you up at night. if you’re good, you’ll leave other people scared of it, too.
Uncanny valley=things that aren’t normal almost getting it right
Third person limited view
Limited explanations
Rot, mold, damage, age, static, flickering, especially in places it shouldn’t be
Limited sights for your mc -blindness, darkness, fog, refuse
Real consequences
Being alone -the more people there are, the less scary it is
Intimate knowledge, but only on one side
I don’t know I just write scary things but I don’t know what I’m doing.
Rule of Thumb: your reader’s imagination will scare them more than anything you could ever write. You don’t have to offer a perfectly concrete explanation for everything at the end. In fact, doing so may detract from your story.
Telling the reader horrible things is never going to be as scary as giving them the tools to figure out those horrible things on their own. Ideally, you want them to figure out the twist just before the answer is revealed, to make the moment that much more powerful and memorable.
Horror can be a lot like a mystery, except the secret is almost always some form of “things are worse than you thought.”
Synopsis: During a sleepover, three unassuming friends play an infamous board game that leads to an array of unexpected events that change all of their lives.
A decadently Gothic examination of intergenerational trauma, self-control and what it means to be monstrous. I read What Big Teeth in just two sittings - both of which were late at night, bundled up in a blanket with a steaming mug of tea, listening to the wind and rain battering against my windows. It was the perfect atmosphere in which to read a creepy, surreal fairytale like this one.
InWhat Big Teeth, Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds.
If I had to describe What Big Teeth in one word it would be: disjointed. That might sound like a critique, but it’s not - what I enjoyed most about this book was that everything - the dysfunctional relationships between characters, the protagonist’s frustratingly vague memories, the eerie setting - felt off-kilter. Even the pacing was jarring, veering from lengthy descriptions of a single afternoon to weeks flashing by in just a few lines. The overall effect was a pervading sense of uneasiness and the feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment.
If I had one wish, it would be that the ending was fleshed out a little more. Once we, the readers, are finally made aware of exactly what is happening, everything happens very quickly. I would have liked to have spent more time with Eleanor and her family after everything had been revealed.
One final thought: can we just appreciate that cover? It’s STUNNING.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for providing a copy of What Big Teeth. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
